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THE UNIVERSITY 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2007 with funding from 
Microsoft Corporation 


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THE ASPIRATIONS 
OF JEAN SERVIEN 


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THE DEPINITIVE EDITION . 





The ASPIRATIONS 


of 
JEAN SERVIEN 





BY ANATOLE FRANCE 











NEW YORK, 
DODD-MEAD & COMPANY 





























Published in U. S. A., 1922 
by 
Dopp, MeaD AND Company, INC. 


PRINTED IN U. 8. A. 


THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS 
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 


College 
Library 


THE ASPIRATIONS 
OF JEAN SERVIEN 





THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN 





Ken EAN SERVIEN was born in a back- 
i shop in the Rue Notre-Dame des 
Champs. His father was a book- 
binder and worked for the Religious 
Houses. Jean was a little weakling 
child, and his mother nursed him at her breast as she 
sewed the books, sheet by sheet, with the curved 
needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing 
the shop, humming a song, in the words of which 
she found expression for the vague, splendid visions 
of her maternal ambition, her foot slipped on the 
boards, which were moist with paste. 

Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the 
child she held clasped to her bosom, and struck her 
breast, thus exposed, a severe blow against the 
corner, of the iron press.’ (She felt tio: very acute 
pain at the time, but later on an abscess formed, 
which got well, but presently reopened, and a low 


fever supervened that confined her to her bed. 


I 


2 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold 
her little one in her one sound arm and croon over 
him in a hot, feverish whisper bits of her favourite 


ditty: 


The fisherman, when dawn is nigh, 
Peers forth to greet the kindling sky.... 


Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at 
the end of each verse with only the change of a 
word. It was her little Jean’s lullaby, who became, 
at the caprice of the words, turn and turn about, 
General, Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar in her 
fond hopes. 

A woman of the people, knowing nothing of the 
circumstances of fashionable life, save from a few 
peeps at their outward pomp and the vague tales of 
concierges, footmen, and cooks, she pictured her boy 
at twenty more beautiful than an archangel, his 
breast glittering with decorations, in a drawing- 
room full of flowers, amid a bevy of fashionable 
ladies with manners every whit as genteel as had the 


actresses at the Gymnase: 


But for the nonce, on mother’s breast, 


Sweet wee gallant, take thy rest. 


Presently the vision changed; now her boy was 


JEAN SERVIEN 3 


standing up gowned in Court, by his eloquence sav- 
ing the life and honour of some illustrious client: 


But for the nonce, on mother’s breast, 


Sweet wee pleader, take thy rest. 


Presently again he was an officer under fire, in a 
brilliant uniform, on a prancing charger, victorious 
in battle, like the great Generals whose portraits 
she had seen one Sunday at Versailles: 


But for the nonce, on mother’s breast, 


Sweet wee general, take thy rest. 


But when night was creeping into the room, a 
new picture would dazzle her eyes, a picture this 
of other and incomparably greater glories. 

Proud in her motherhood, yet humble too at 
heart, she was gazing from the dim recesses of a 
sanctuary at her son, her Jean, clad in sacerdotal 
vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted 
choir censed by the beating wings of half-seen Cher- 
ubim. And she would tremble awestruck as if she 
were the mother of a god, this poor sick work- 
woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping 
in the poisoned air of a back-shop: 


But for the nonce, on mother’s breast, 
My sweet boy-bishop, take thy rest. 


4 JEAN SERVIEN 


One evening, as her husband handed her a cool- 
ing drink, she said to him in a tone of regret: 

“Why did you disturb me? I could see the Holy 
Virgin among flowers and precious stones and lights. 
It was so beautiful! so beautiful!” 

She said she was no longer in pain, that she 
wished her Jean to learn Latin. And she passed 


away. 


II 


@HE widower, who was from the 
Beauce country, sent his son to his 
native village in the Eure-et-Loire to 
be brought up by kinsfolk there. 
As for himself, he was a strong 
man, and soon learned to be resigned; he was of a 
saving habit by instinct in both business and family 





matters, and never put off the green serge apron 
from week’s end to week’s end save for a Sunday 
visit to the cemetery. He would hang a wreath on 
the arm of the black cross, and, if it was a hot day, 
take a chair on the way back along the boulevard 
outside the door of a wine-shop. There, as he sat 
slowly emptying his glass, his eye would rest on the 
mothers and their youngsters going by on the side- 
walk. 

These young wives, as he watched them approach 
and pass on, were so many passing reminders of 
his Clotilde and made him feel sad without his quite 
understanding why, for he was not much given to 
thinking. 

Time slipped by, and little by little his dead wife 

5 


6 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


grew to be a tender, vague memory in the book- 
binder’s mind. One night he tried in vain to recall 
Clotilde’s features; after this experience, he told 
himself that perhaps he might be able to discover 
the mother’s lineaments in the child’s face, and he 
was seized with a great longing to see this relic of 
the lost one once more, to have the child home 
again. 

In the morning he wrote a letter to his old sister, 
Mademoiselle Servein, begging her to come and 
take up her abode with the little one in the Rue 
Notre-Dame des Champs. The sister, who had 
lived for many years in Paris at her brother’s ex- 
pense, for indolence was her ruling passion, agreed 
to resume her life in a city where, she used to 
say, folks are free and need not depend on their 
neighbours. 

One autumn evening she arrived at the Gare de 
?Ouest with Jean and her boxes and baskets, an 
upright, hard-featured, fierce-eyed figure, all ready 
to defend the child against all sorts of imaginary 
perils. The bookbinder kissed the lad and ex- 
pressed his satisfaction in two words, 

Then he lifted him pickaback on his shoulders, 
and bidding him hold on tight to his father’s hair, 
carried him off proudly to the house. 


JEAN SERVIEN 7 


Jean was seven. Soon existence settled down to 
a settled routine. At midday the old dame would 
don her shawl and set off with the child in the di- 
rection of Grenelle. 

The pair followed the broad thoroughfares that 
ran between shabby walls and red-fronted drinking- 
shops. Generally speaking, a sky of a dappled 
grey like the great cart-horses that plodded past, 
invested the quiet suburb with a gentle melancholy. 
Establishing herself on a bench, while the child 
played under a tree, she would knit her stocking and 
chat with an old soldier and tell him her troubles 
—what a hard life it was in other people’s houses. 

One day, one of the last fine days of the season, 
Jean, squatted on the ground, was busy sticking up 
bits of plane-tree bark in the fine wet sand. That 
faculty of “pretending,” by which children are able 
to make their lives one unending miracle, trans- 
formed a handful of soil and a few bits of wood 
into wondrous galleries and fairy castles to the lad’s 
imagination; he clapped his hands and leapt for 
joy. Then suddenly he felt himself wrapped in 
something soft and scented. It was a lady’s gown; 
he saw nothing except that she smiled as she put 
him gently out of her way and walked on. He ran 
to tell his aunt: 


8 EAN BoE RWLEEN 


“How good she smells, that lady!” 

Mademoiselle Servein only muttered that great 
ladies were no better than others, and that she 
thought more of herself with her merino skirt than 
all those set-up minxes in their flounces and finery, 
adding: 

“Better a good name than a gilt girdle.” 

But this talk was beyond little Jean’s compre- 
hension. The perfumed silk that had swept his 
face left behind a vague sweetness, a memory as of a 


gentle, ghostly caress. 


III 


(Sg FS] NE evening in summer the book- 


r as 
, @ A 
“ y Se 


binder was enjoying the fresh air be- 
fore his door when a big man with 


a red nose, past middle age and 





wearing a scarlet waistcoast stained 
with grease-spots, appeared, bowing politely and 
confidentially, and addressed him in a sing-song 
voice in which even Monsieur Servien could detect 
an Italian accent: 

‘Sir, I have translated the Gerusalemme Libe- 
rata, the immortal masterpiece of Torquato Tasso”’ 
—and a bulging packet of manuscript under his arm 
confirmed the statement. _ 

‘Yes, sir, I have devoted sleepless nights to this 
glorious and ungrateful task. Without family or 
fatherland, I have written my translation in dark, 
ice-cold garrets, on chandlers’ wrappers, snuff pa- 
pers, the backs of playing cards! Such has been 
the exile’s task! You, sir, you live in your own 
land, in the bosom of a happy family—at least I 
hope so.” 

This speech, which impressed him by its magnilo- 
9 


10 DHE ASPIRATIONS OF 


quence and its strangeness, set the bookbinder dream- 
ing of the dead woman he had loved, and he saw 
her in his mind’s eye coiling her beautiful hair as 
in the early days of their married life. 

The big man proceeded: 

“(Man is like a plant which perishes when the 
storms uproot it. 

‘Here is your son, is it not so? He is like you” 
—and laying his hand on Jean’s head, who clung to 
his father’s coat-tails in wonder at the red waist- 
coat and the sing-song voice, he asked if the child 
learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to be 
a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning 
Latin. 

‘That noble language,” he added, ‘“‘whose inimit- 
able monuments have often made me forget my mis- 
fortunes. 

“Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of 
Tacitus and supped on a satire of Juvenal.” 

As he said the words, a look of sadness 
overspread his shining red face, and dropping his 
voice: 

‘Forgive me, sir, if I hold out to you the casque 
of Belisarius. I am the Marquis Tudesco, of Ven- | 
ice. When I have received from the bookseller the 
price of my labour, I will not forget that you suc- 





JEAN SERVIEN 11 


coured me with a small coin in the time of my sharp- 
est trial.” 

The bookbinder, case-hardened as he was against 
beggars, who on winter evenings drifted into his 
shop with the east wind, nevertheless experienced a 
certain sympathy and respect for the Marquis Tu- 
desco. He slipped a franc-piece into his hand. 

Thereupon the old Italian, like a man inspired, 
exclaimed: 

“One Nation there is that is unhappy—Italy, one 
generous People—France; and one bond that unites 
the twain—humanity. Ah! chiefest of the virtues, 
humanity, humanity!” 

Meantime the bookbinder was pondering his 
wife’s last words: “I wish my Jean to learn 
Latin.” He hesitated, till seeing Monsieur Tu- 
desco bowing and smiling to go: 

‘ol, Nessaidy i yourate ready, two or three 
times a week, to give the boy lessons in French and 
Latin, we might come to terms.”’ 

The Marquis Tudesco expressed no surprise. He 
smiled and said: 

“Certainly, sir, as you wish it, I shall find it a 
delightful task to initiate your son in the mysteries 
of the Latin rudiments. 


‘We will make a man of him and a good citizen, 


12 JEAN SERVIEN 


and God knows what heights my pupil will scale in 
this noble land of freedom and generosity. He 
may one day be ambassador, my dear sir. I say it: 
knowledge is power.” 

“You will know the shop again,” said the book- | 
binder; ‘‘there is my name on the signboard.” 

The Marquis Tudesco, after tweaking the son’s 
ear amicably and bowing to the father with a digni- 
fied familiarity, walked away with a step that was 
still jaunty. 


IV 


9 HE Marquis Tudesco returned in due 
course, smiled at Mademoiselle Ser- 
vien, who darted poisonous looks at 
him, greeted the bookbinder with a 





discreet air of patronage, and had a 
supply of grammars and dictionaries bought. 

At first he gave his lessons with exemplary regu- 
larity. He had taken a liking to these repetitions 
of nouns and verbs, which he listened to with a dig- 
nified, condescending air, slowly unrolling his screw 
of snuff the while; he only interrupted to interject 
little playful remarks with a geniality just touched 
with a trace of ferocity, that bespoke his real na- 
ture as an unctuous, cringing bully. He was jocu- 
lar and pompous at the same time, and always made 
a pretence of being a long time in seeing the glass 
of wine put on the table for his refreshment. 

The bookbinder, regarding him as a clever man 
of ill-regulated life, always treated him with great 
consideration, for faults of behaviour almost cease 
to shock us except among neighbours, or at most 
fellow-countrymen. Without knowing it, Jean 
13 


14 THE ASPIRATIONS: OF 


found a fund of amusement in the witticisms and 
harangues of his old teacher, who united in himself 
the contradictory attributes of high-priest and buf- 
foon. He was great at telling a story, and though 
his tales were beyond the child’s intelligence, they 
did not fail to leave behind a confused impression 
of recklessness, irony, and cynicism. Mademoi- 
selle Servien alone never relaxed her attitude of un- 
compromising dislike and disdain. She said noth- 
ing against him, but her face was a rigid mask of 
disapproval, her eyes two flames of fire, in answer 
to the courteous greeting the tutor never failed to 
offer her with a special roll of his little grey eyes. 

One day the Marquis Tudesco walked into the 
shop with a staggering gait; his eyes glittered and 
his mouth hung half open in anticipation of racy 
talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his 
pink cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, 
gallantly carried, gave him, beneath his jacket and 
felt hat, a perfect likeness to a little rustic god his 
ancestors worshipped, the old Silenus. 

Lessons that day were fitful and haphazard. 
Jean was repeating in a drawling voice: moneo, 
mones, monet... monebam, monebas, monebat 
. . . Suddenly Monsieur Tudesco sprang forward, 
dragging his chair along the floor with a horrid 


JEAN SERVIEN 15 


screech, and clapping his hand on his pupil’s 
shoulder: 

“Child,” he said, “to-day I am going to give you 
a more profitable lesson than all the pitiful teaching 
I have confined myself to up to now. 

“It is a lesson of transcendental philosophy. 
Hearken carefully, child. If one day you rise above 
your station and come to know yourself and the 
world about you, you will discover this, that men act 
only out of regard for the opinion of their fellows 
—and per Bacco! they are consummate fools for 
their pains. They dread other folks’ blame and 
crave their approval. 

‘The idiots fail to see that the world does not 
care a straw for them, and that their dearest friends 
will see them glorified or disgraced without miss- 
ing one mouthful of their dinner. This is my les- 
son, caro figliuolo, that the world’s opinion is not 
worth the sacrifice of a single one of our desires. 
If you get this into your pate, you will be a strong 
man and can boast you were once the pupil of the 
Marquis Tudesco, of Venice, the exile who has 
translated in a freezing garret, on scraps of refuse 
paper, the immortal poem of Torquato Tasso. 
What a task!” 

The child listened to the tipsy philosopher with- 


16 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


out understanding one word of his rigmarole; only 
Monsieur Tudesco struck him as a strange and 
alarming personage, and taller by a hundred feet 
than anybody he had ever seen before. 

The professor warmed to his subject: 


“and 


“Ah! he cried, springing from his seat, 
what profit did the immortal and ill-starred Tor- 
quato Tasso win from all his genius? A few stolen 
kisses on the steps of a palace. And he died of 
famine in a madhouse. I say it: the world’s opin- 
ion, that empress of human-kind, I will tear from 
her her crown and sceptre. Opinion tyrannizes 
over unhappy Italy, as over all the earth. Italy! 
what flaming sword will one day come to break her 
fetters, as now I break this chair?” 

In fact, he had seized his chair by the back and 
was pounding it fiercely on the floor. 

But suddenly he stopped, gave a knowing smile, 
and said in a low voice: 

“No, no, Marquis Tudesco, let be, let Venice 
be a prey to Teuton savagery. The fetters of the 
fatherland are daily bread to the exiled patriot.” 

His chin buried in his cravat, he stood chuckling 
to himself, and his red waistcoat rose and fell in 
jerks. 

Mademoiselle Servien, who sat by at the lesson 


JEAN SERVIEN 17 


knitting a stocking and for some moments had been 
watching the tutor, her spectacles pushed half-way 
up her forehead, with a look of amazement and 
suspicion, exclaimed, as if talking to herself: 

“If it isn’t abominable to come to people’s houses 
in drink!” 

Monsieur Tudesco did not seem to hear her. 
His manner was quiet and jocular again. 

“Child,” he ordered, ‘‘write down the theme for 
an essay. Write down: ‘The worst thing... 
yes, the worst thing of all,’ write it down . . . ‘is 
an old woman with a spiteful temper.’ ” 

And rising with the gracious dignity of a Prince 
of the Church, he bowed low to the aunt, gave the 
nephew’s cheek a friendly tap, and marched out of 
the room. 

However, beginning with the very next lesson, 
he lavished every mark of respect on the old lady, 
and treated her to all his choicest airs and graces, 
rounding his elbows, pursing his lips, strutting and 
swaggering. She would not relax a muscle, and 
sat there as silent and sulky as an owl. 

But one day when she was hunting for her spec- 
tacles, as she was always doing, Monsieur Tudesco 
offered her his and persuaded her to try them; she 
found they suited her sight and felt a trifle less 


18 JEAN SERVIEN 


unamiable towards him. ‘The Italian, pursuing his 
advantage, got into talk with her, and artfully 
turned the conversation upon the vices of the rich. 
The old lady approved his sentiments, and an ex- 
change of petty confidences ensued. ‘Tudesco knew 
a sovereign remedy for catarrh, and this too was 
well received. He redoubled his attentions, and 
the concierge, who saw him smiling to himself on 
the doorstep, told Aunt Servien: “The man’s in 
love with you.” Of course she declared: “At my 
time of life a woman doesn’t want lovers,” but her 
vanity was tickled all the same. Monsieur Tudesco 
got what he wanted—to have his glass filled to the 
brim every lesson. Out of politeness they would 
even leave him the pint jug only half empty, which 
he was indiscreet enough to drain dry. 

One day he asked for a taste of cheese—‘‘just 
enough to make a mouse’s dinner,”’ was his expres- 
sion. ‘Mice are like me, they love the dark and a 
quiet life and books; and like me they live on 
crumbs.” 

This pose of the wise man fallen on evil days 
made a bad impression, and the old lady became 
silent and sombre as before. 

When springtime came Monsieur ‘Tudesco 


vanished. 


V 
sm) HIE bookbinder, for all his scanty 


earnings, was resolved to enter Jean 
at a school where the boy could en- 
joy a regular and complete course of 





instruction. He selected a day- 
school not far from the Luxembourg, because he 
could see the top branches of an acacia overtopping 
the wall, and the house had a cheerful look. 

Jean, as a little new boy (he was now eleven), was 
some weeks before he shook off the shyness with 
which his schoolfellows’ loud voices and rough ways 
and his masters’ ponderous gravity had at first over- 
whelmed him. Little by little he grew used to the 
work, and learned some of the tricks by means of 
which punishments were avoided; his schoolfellows 
found him so inoffensive they left off stealing his 
cap and initiated him in the game of marbles. But 
he had little love for school-life, and when five 
o'clock came, prayers were over and his satchel 
strapped, it was with unfeigned delight he dashed 
out into the street basking in the golden rays of the 
setting sun. In the intoxication of freedom, he 
19 


20 JEAN SERVIEN 


danced and leapt, seeing everything, men and horses, 
carriages and shops, in a charmed light, and out of 
sheer joy of life mumbling at his Aunt Servien’s 
hand and arm, as she walked home with him carry- 
ing the satchel and lunch-basket. 

The evening was a peaceful time. Jean would 
sit drawing pictures or dreaming over his copy- 
books at one end of the table where Mademoiselle 
Servien had just cleared away the meal. His father 
would be busy with a book. As age advanced he 
had acquired a taste for reading, his favourites being 
La Fontaine’s Fables, Anquetil’s History of France, 
and Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique, “‘to get 


’ 


the hang of things,” as he put it. His sister made 
fruitless efforts to distract his attention with some 
stinging criticism of the neighbours or a question 
about “‘our fat friend who had not come back,” for 
she made a point of never remembering the Marquis 


Tudesco’s name. 


VI 


~|EFORE long Jean’s whole mind was 


given over to the catechizings and 





SoS 
en 


sermons and hymns preparatory to 


Sa 


the First Communion. Intoxicated 








with the music of chants and organ, 
drowned in the scent of incense and flowers, hung 
about with scapularies, rosaries, consecrated med- 
als, and holy images, he, like his companions, as- 
sumed a certain air of self-importance and wore a 
smug, sanctified look. He was cold and unbend- 
ing towards his aunt, who spoke with far too much 
unconcern about the “great day.” Though she had 
long been in the habit of taking her nephew to 
Mass every Sunday, she was not “pious.” Most 
likely she confounded in one common detestation 
the luxury of the rich and the pomps of the Church 
service. She had more than once been overheard 
informing one of the cronies she used to meet on 
the boulevards that she was a religious woman, but 
she could not abide priests, that she said her pray- 
ers at home, and these were every bit as good as 
the fine ladies’ who flaunted their crinolines in 


2I 


22 THE: ASPIRATIONS OF 


church. His father was more in sympathy with 
the lad’s new-found zeal; he was interested and 
even a little impressed. He undertook to bind a 
missal with his own hands against the ceremony. 
When the days arrived for retreats and general 
confessions, Jean swelled with pride and vague as- 
pirations. He looked for something out of the 
ordinary to happen. Coming out at evening from 
Saint-Sulpice with two or three of his schoolfellows, 
he would feel an atmosphere of miracle about him; 
some divine interposition must be forthcoming. 
The lads used to tell each other strange stories, 
pious legends they had read in one of their little 
books of devotion. Now it was a phantom monk 
who had stepped out of the grave, showing the 
stigmata on hands and feet and the pierced side; 
now a nun, beautiful as the veiled figures in the 
Church pictures, expiating in the fires of hell mys- 
terious sins. Jean had his favourite tale. Shud- 
dering, he would relate how St. Francis Borgia, 
after the death of Queen Isabella, who was lovely 
beyond compare, must have the coffin opened 
wherein she lay at rest in her robe embroidered 
with pearls; in imagination he pictured the dead 
Queen, invested her form with all the magic hues 


of the unknown, traced in her lineaments the en- 


JEAN SERVIEN 23 


chantments of a woman’s beauty in the dark gulf 
of death. And as he told the tale, he could hear, 
in the twilight gloom, a murmur of soft voices sigh- 
ing in the plane trees of the Luxembourg. 

The great day arrived. The bookbinder, who 
attended the ceremony with his sister, thought of 
his wife and wept. 

He was most favourably impressed by the curé’s 
homily, in which a young man without faith was 
compared to an unbridled charger that plunges 
over precipices. ‘The simile struck his fancy, and 
he would quote it years after with approbation. 
He made up his mind to read the Bible, as he had 
read Voltaire, ‘‘to get the hang of things.”’ 

Jean withdrew from the houselling cloth won- 
dering to be just the same as ever and already 
disillusioned. He was never again to recover the 


first fervent rapture. 





ay 





Vil 


@a HE holidays were near. At noon of 
a blazing hot day Jean was seated 
| in the shade on the dwarf-wall that 
an bounded the school court towards 
©, the headmaster’s garden. He was 





eae languidly at shovel-board with a schoolfel- 
low, a lad as pretty as a girl with his curls and his 
jacket of white duck. 

‘‘Ewans,”’ said Jean, as he pushed a pebble along 
one of the lines drawn in charcoal on the stone 
coping, ‘‘Ewans, you must find it tiresome to be 
a boarder?” 

‘Mother cannot have me with her at home,” re- 
plied the boy. 

Servien asked why. 

“Oh! because———”’ stammered Ewans. 

He stared a long time at the white pebble he 
held in his hand ready to play, before he added: 

‘‘My mother goes travelling.” 

“And your father?” 

“He is in America. J have never seen him. 
You've lost. Let’s begin again.” 

25 


26 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


Servien, who felt interested in Madame Ewans 
because of the superb boxes of chocolates she used 
to bring to school for her boy, put another ques- 
tion: 

“You love her very much, your mother I mean?” 

“Of course I do!” cried the other, adding pres- 
ently: 

‘You must come and see me one day in the hol- 
idays at home. You'll find our house is very 
pretty, there’s sofas and cushions no end. But you 
must not put off, for we shall be off to the seaside 
soon.” 

At this moment a servant, a tall, thin man, ap- 
peared in the playground and called out something 
which the shrill cries of their companions at play 
prevented the two seated on the wall from hearing. 
A fat boy, standing by himself with his face to the 
wall with the unconcern born of long familiarity 
with this form of punishment, clapped his two 
hands to his mouth trumpetwise and shrieked: 

‘‘Ewans, you’re wanted in the parlour.” 

The usher marched up: 

‘““Garneret,”’ he ordered, ‘“‘you will stand out half 
an hour this evening at preparation for speaking 
when you were forbidden to. Ewans, go to the 
parlour.” 


JEAN SERVIEN 25 


The latter clapped his hands and danced for joy, 
telling his friend: 

“It’s my mother! T’ll tell her you are coming 
to our house.” 

Servien reddened with pleasure, and stammered 
out that he would ask his father’s leave. But 
Ewans had already scampered across the yard, leav- 
ing a dusty furrow behind him. 

Leave was readily granted by Monsieur Servien, 
who was fully persuaded that all the boys admitted 
to so expensive a school were born of well-to-do 
parents, whose society could not but prove advan- 
tageous to his son’s manners and morals and to his 
future success in life. 

Such information as Jean could give him about 
Madame Ewans was extremely vague, but the book- 
binder was well used to contemplating the ways of 
rich folks through a veil of impenetrable mystery. 

Aunt Servien indulged in sundry observations on 
the occasion of a very general kind touching people 
who ride in carriages. Then she repeated a story 
about a great lady who, just like Madame Ewans, 
had put her son to boarding-school, and who was 
mixed up in a case of illicit commissions, in the 
time of Louis-Philippe. 

She added, to clinch the matter, that the cowl 


28 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


does not make the monk, that she thought herself, 
for all she did not wear flowers in her hat, a more 
honest woman than your society ladies, false jades 
every one, concluding with her pet proverb: Bet- 
ter a good name than a gilt girdle! 

Jean had never seen a gilt girdle, but he thought 
in a vague way he would very much like to have one. 

The holidays came, and one Thursday after 
breakfast his aunt produced a white waistcoat from 
the wardrobe, and Jean, dressed in his Sunday best, 
climbed on an omnibus which took him to the Rue de 
Rivoli. He mounted four flights of a staircase, the 
carpet and polished brass stair-rods of which filled 
him with surprise and admiration. 

On reaching the landing, he could hear the tin- 
kling of a piano. He rang the bell, blushed hotly 
and was sorry he had rung. He would have given 
worlds to run away. A maid-servant opened the 
door, and behind her stood Edgar Ewans, wearing 
a brown holland suit, in which he looked entirely 
at his ease. 

‘Come along,” he cried, and dragged him into a 
drawing-room, into which the half-drawn curtains 
admitted shafts of sunlight that were flashed back 
in countless broken reflections from mirrors and 


gilt cornices. A sweet, stimulating perfume hung 


JEAN SERVIEN 29 


about the room, which was crowded with a super- 
abundance of padded chairs and couches and piles 
of cushions. 

In the half-light Jean beheld a lady so different 
from all he had ever set eyes on till that moment 
that he could form no notion of what she was, no 
idea of her beauty or her age. Never had he seen 
eyes that flashed so vividly in a face of such pale 
fairness, or lips so red, smiling with such an un- 
varying almost tired-looking smile. She was sit- 
ting at a piano, idly strumming on the keys without 
playing any definite tune. What drew Jean’s eyes 
above all was her hair, arranged in some fashion 
that struck him with a sense of mystery and beauty. 

She looked round, and smoothing the lace of her 
peignoir with one hand: 

“You are Edgar’s friend?” she asked, in a cor- 
dial tone, though her voice struck Jean as harsh in 
this beautiful room that was perfumed like a 
church. | 

“Yes, Madame.” 

“You like being at school?” 

“Yes, Madame.” 

‘‘The masters are not too strict?” 

‘““No, Madame.” 


‘*You have no mother ?”’ 


30 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


As she put the question Madame Ewans’ voice 
softened. 

‘“‘No, Madame.” 

“What is your father?” 

‘A bookbinder, Madame’’—and the bookbinder’s 
son blushed as he gave the answer. At that mo- 
ment he would gladly have consented never to see 
his father more, his father whom he loved, if by the 
sacrifice he could have passed for the son of a Cap- 
tain in the Navy or a Secretary of the Embassy. 
He suddenly remembered that one of his fellow- 
pupils was the son of a celebrated physician whose 
portrait was displayed in the stationers’ windows. 

If only he had had a father like that to tell 
Madame Ewans of! But that was out of the 
question—and how cruelly unjust it was! He felt 
ashamed of himself, as if he had said something 
shocking. 

But his friend’s mother seemed quite unaffected 
by the dreadful avowal. She was still moving her 
hands at random up and down the keyboard. Then 
presently: 

“You must enjoy yourself finely to-day, boys,” 
she cried. ‘We will all go out. Shall I take you 
to the fair at Saint-Cloud?” 


JEAN SERVIEN 31 


Yes, Edgar was all for going, because of the 
roundabouts. 

Madame Ewans rose from the piano, patted her 
pale flaxen hair in place with a pretty gesture, and 
gave a sidelong look in the mirror as she passed. 

‘I’m going to dress,” she told them; “I shall 
not be long.” 

While she was dressing, Edgar sat at the piano 
trying to pick out a tune from an opera bouffe, and 
Jean, perched uncomfortably on the edge of his 
chair, stared about the room at a host of strange 
and sumptuous objects that seemed in some mysteri- 
ous way to be part and parcel of their beautiful 
owner, and affected him almost as strangely as she 
herself had done. 

Preceded by a faint waft of scent and a rustle of 
silk, she reappeared, tying the strings of the hat that 
made a dainty diadem above her smiling eyes. 

Edgar looked at her curiously: 

‘‘Why, mother, there’s something . . . I don’t 
know what . . . something that alters you.” 

She glanced in the mirror, examining her hair, 
which showed pale violet shadows amid the flaxen 
plaits. 

“Oh! it’s nothing,’ she said; ‘‘only I have put 


32 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


some powder in my hair. Like the Empress,” she 
added, and broke into another smile. 

As she was drawing on her gloves, a ring was 
heard, and the maid came in to tell her mistress 
that Monsieur Delbéque was waiting to see her. 

Madame Ewans pouted and declared she could 
not receive him, whereupon the maid spoke a few 
words in a very peremptory whisper. Madame 
Ewans shrugged her shoulders. 

“Stay where you are!” she told the boys, and 
passed into the dining-room, whence the murmur of 
two voices could presently be heard. 

Jean asked Edgar, under his breath, who the 
gentleman was. 


’ 


‘Monsieur Delbéque,” Edgar informed him. 
‘‘He keeps horses and a carriage. He deals in pigs. 
One evening he took us to the theatre, mother and 
me.” 

Jean was surprised and rather shocked to find 
Monsieur Delbéque dealt in pigs. But he hid his 
surprise and asked if he was a relation. 

“Oh! no,” said Edgar, ‘“‘he’s one of our friends. 
It’s along time . . . at least a year we have known 
him.” 

Jean, harking back to his first idea, put the ques- 


tion: 


JEAN SERVIEN 33 


‘“Have you ever seen him selling his pigs?” 

‘“‘How stupid you are!” retorted Edgar; “he deals 
in them wholesale. Mother says it’s a famous 
trade. He has a cigar-holder with an amber 
mouthpiece and a woman all naked carved in meer- 
schaum. Just think, the other day he came and 
told mother his wife was making him atrocious 
Scenes.” 

Madame Ewans put in her head at the half- 
open door: 

“Come along,” she said, and they set out. No 
sooner were they in the street than a man, who was 
smoking, greeted Madame with a friendly wave 
of his gloved hand. She muttered between her 
teeth: 

‘Shall we never be done with them?” 

The man began in a guttural voice: 

‘I was just going to your place, my dear, to offer 
you a box of Turkish cigarettes. But I see you are 
taking a boarding-school out for a walk—a regular 
boarding-school, pon my word! You take pupils, 
eh? I congratulate you. Make men of ’em, my 
dear, make men of ’em.” 

Madame Ewans frowned and replied with a curl 
of the lips: 

“T am with my son and one of my son’s friends.” 


34 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


The gentleman threw a careless look at one of 
the lads—Jean Servien as it happened. 

“Capital, capital!’ he exclaimed. ‘‘Is that one 
your son?” 

“Not he, indeed!” she cried hotly. 

Jean felt he was looked down upon, and as she 
laid her hand on her son’s shoulder with a proud 
gesture, he could not help noticing his schoolfellow’s 
easy air and elegant costume, at the same time cast- 
ing a glance of disgust at his own jacket, which had 
been cut down for him by his aunt out of an over- 
coat of his father’s. 

“Shall we be honoured by your presence to-night 
at the Bouffes?” asked the gentleman. 

“No!’’ replied Madame Ewans, and pushed the 
two children forward with the tip of her sunshade. 

Stepping out gaily, they soon arrive under the 
chestnuts of the Tuileries, cross the bridge, then 
down the river-bank, over the shaky gangway, and 
so on to the steamer pontoon. 

Now they are aboard the boat, which exhales a 
strong, healthy smell of tar under the hot sun. 
The long grey walls of the embankments slip by, to 
be succeeded presently by wooded slopes. 

Saint-Cloud! The moment the ropes are made 


fast, Madame Ewans springs on to the landing- 


JEAN SERVIEN 35 


stage and makes straight for the shrilling of the 
clarinettes and thunder of the big drums, steering 
her little charges through the press with the handle 
of her sunshade. 

Jean was mightily surprised when Madame 
Ewans made him “try his luck” in a lottery. He 
had before now gone with his aunt to sundry sub- 
urban fairs, but she had always dissuaded him so 
peremptorily from spending anything that he was 
firmly persuaded revolving-tables and _ shooting- 
galleries were amusements only permitted to a class 
of people to which he did not belong. Madame 
Ewans showed the greatest interest in her son’s 
success, urging him to give the handle a good vigor- 
ous turn. 

She was very superstitious about luck, “‘invoking”’ 
the big prizes, clapping her hands in ecstasy when- 
ever Edgar won a halfpenny egg-cup, falling into 
the depths of despair at every bad shot. Perhaps 
she saw an omen in his failure; perhaps she was just 
blindly eager to have her darling succeed. After he 
had lost two or three times, she pulled the boy away 
and gave the wooden disk such a violent push round 
as set its cargo of crockery-ware and glass rattling, 
and proceeded to play on her own account—once, 


twice, twenty times, thirty times, with frantic eager- 


36 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


ness. Then followed quite a business about ex- 
changing the small prizes for one big one, as is com- 
monly done. Finally, she decided for a set of 
beer jugs and glasses, half of which she gave to each 
of the two friends:to carry. 

But this was only a beginning. She halted the 
children before every stall. She made them play 
for macaroons at rouge et noir. She had them try 
their skill at every sort of shooting-game, with cross- 
bows loaded with little clay pellets, with pistols 
and carbines, old-fashioned weapons with caps and 
leaden bullets, at all sorts of distances, and at all 
kinds of targets—plaster images, revolving pipes, 
dolls, balls bobbing up and down on top of a jet of 
water. 

Never in his life had Jean Servien been so busy 
or done so many different things in so short a space 
of time. 

His eyes dazzled with uncouth shapes and star- 
tling colours, his throat parched with dust, elbowed, 
crushed, mauled, hustled by the crowd, he was in- 
toxicated with this debauch of diversions. 

He watched Madame Ewans for ever opening 
her little purse of Russia leather, and a new power 
was revealed to him. Nor was this all. There 


was the Dutch top to be set twirling, the wooden 


JEAN SERVIEN 37 


horses of the merry-go-round to be mounted; they 
had to dash down the great chute and take a turn 
in the Venetian gondolas, to be weighed in the ma- 
chine and touch the arm of the “human torpedo.” 

But Madame Ewans could not help returning 
again and again to stand before the booth of a hyp- 
notist from Paris, a clairvoyant boasting a certifi- 
cate signed by the Minister of Agriculture and Com- 
merce and by three Doctors of the Faculty. She 
gazed enviously at the servant-girls as they trooped 
up blushing into the van meagrely furnished with a 
bed and a couple of chairs; but she could not pluck 
up courage to follow their example. 

She recalled to mind how a hypnotist had once 
helped a friend of hers to recover some stolen forks 
and spoons. She had even gone so far as to con- 
sult a fortune-teller shortly before Edgar’s birth, 
and the cards had foretold a boy. 

All three were tired out and overloaded with 
crockery, glass, reed-pipes, sticks of sugar-candy, 
cakes of ginger-bread and macaroons. For all that, 
they paid a visit to the wax-works, where they saw 
Monseigneur Sibour’s body lying in state at the 
Archbishop’s Palace, the execution of Mary Queen 
of Scots, models of people’s legs and arms disfig- 


ured by various hideous diseases, and a Circassian 


38 THE ASPIRATIONS: OF 


maiden stepping out of the bath—‘‘the purest type 
of female beauty,” as a placard duly informed the 
public. Madame Ewans examined this last exhibit 
with a curiosity that very soon became critical. 

“People may say what they please,’”’ she mut- 
tered; “if you offered me the whole world, J 
wouldn’t have such big feet and such a thick waist. 
And then, your regular features aren’t one bit at- 
tractive. Men like a face that says something.” 

When they left the tent, the sun was low and the 
dust hovered in golden clouds over the throng of 
women, working-men, and soldiers. 

It was time for dinner; but as they passed the 
monkey-cage, Madame Ewans noticed such a crush 
of eager spectators squeezing in between the baize 
curtains on the platform in front that she could not 
resist the temptation to follow suit. Besides which, 
she was drawn by a motive of curiosity, having been 
told that monkeys were not insensible to female 
charms. But the performance diverted her 
thoughts in another direction. She saw an un- 
happy poodle in red breeches shot as a deserter in 
spite of his honest looks. Tears rose to her eyes, 
she was so sensitive, so susceptible to the glamour 
of the stage! 

“Yes, it’s quite true,” she sobbed; “‘yes, poor 


JEAN SERVIEN 39 


soldiers have been shot before now just for going 
off without leave to stand by their mother’s death- 
bed or for smacking a bullying officer’s face.” 

Some old refrain of Béranger she had heard 
working folks sing in her plebeian childhood rose 
to her memory and intensified her emotion. She 
told the children the lamentable tale of the canine — 
deserter’s pitiful doom, and made them feel quite 
sad. 

No sooner were they outside the place, however, 
than an itinerant toy-seller with a paper helmet on 
his head set them splitting with laughter. 

Dinner must be thought of. She knew of a tav- 
ern by the river-side where you could eat a fry of 
fish in the arbour, and thither they betook them- 
selves. 

The lady from Paris and the landlady of the 
inn greeted each other with a wink of the eye. It 
was a long time since she had seen Madame; she 
had no idea who the two young gentlemen were, but 
anyway they were dear little angels. Madame 
Ewans ordered the meal like a connoisseur, with a 
knowing air and all the proper restaurant tricks of 
phrase. All three sat silent, agreeably tired and 
enjoying the sensation, she with her bonnet-strings 
flying loose, the boys leaning back against the trellis. 


40 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


They could see the river and its grassy banks 
through an archway of wild vine. Their thoughts 
flowed softly on like the current before their eyes, 
while the dusk and cool of the evening wrapped 
them in a soft caress. For the first time Jean Ser- 
vien, as he gazed at Madame Ewans, felt the thrill 
of a woman’s sweet proximity. 

Presently, warmed by a trifle of wine and water 
he had drunk, he became wholly lost in his dreams 
—visions of all sorts of elegant, preposterous, 
chivalrous things. His head was still full of these 
fancies when he was dragged back to the fair-ground 
by Madame Ewans, who could never have enough 
of sight-seeing and noise. Illuminated arches 
spanned at regular intervals the broad-walk, lined 
on either side by stalls and trestle-tables, but the 
lateral avenues gloomed dark and deserted under 
the tall black trees. Loving couples paced them 
slowly, while the music from the shows sounded 
muffled by the distance. They were still there when 
a band of fifes, trombones, and trumpets struck up 
close by, playing a popular polka tune. The very 
first bar put Madame Ewans on her mettle. She 
drew Jean to her, settled his hands in hers and lift- 
ing him off the ground with a jerk of the hip, began 
dancing with him. She swung and swayed to the 


JEAN SERVIEN 41 


lilt of the music; but the boy was awkward and em- 
barrassed, and only hindered his partner, dragging 
back and bumping against her. She threw him 
off roughly and impatiently, saying sharply: — 

‘“You don’t know how to dance, eh? You come 
here, Edgar.” 

She danced a while with him in the semi-darkness. 
Then, rosy and smiling: 

“Bravo!” she laughed; “we'll stop now.” 

Servien stood by in gloomy silence, conscious of 
his own inefficiency. His heart swelled with a sul- 
len anger. He was hurt, and longed for some- 
body or something to vent his hate upon. 

The drive home was a silent one. Jean nearly 
gave himself cramp in his determined efforts not to 
touch with his own the knees of Madame Ewans, 
who dozed on the back seat of the conveyance. 
She hardly awoke enough to bid him good-bye when 
he alighted at his father’s door. 

As he entered he was struck for the first time by 
a smell of paste that seemed past bearing. The 
room where he had slept for years, happy in himself 
and loved by others, seemed a wretched hole. He 
sat down on his bed and looked round gloomily and 
morosely at the holy-water stoup of gilt porcelain, 


the print commemorating his First Communion, 


42 JEAN SERVIEN 


the toilet basin on the chest of drawers, and stacked 
in the corners piles of pasteboard and ornamental 
paper for binding. 

Everything about him seemed animated by a 
hostile, malevolent, unjust spirit. In the next room 
he could hear his father moving. He pictured him 
at his work-bench, with his serge apron, calm and 
content. What a humiliation! and for the second 
time in a dozen hours he blushed for his parentage. 

His slumbers were broken and uneasy; he 
dreamed he was turning, turning unendingly in com- 
plicated figures, and it was impossible always to 
avoid touching Madame Ewans’ knee, though all 
the time he was horribly afraid of doing it. Then 
there was a great field full of thousands and thou- 
sands of marble pigs stuck up on stone pedestals, 
among which he could see Monsieur Delbéque 


promenading slowly up and down. 


Vill 


AM EXT morning he awoke feeling sour- 
tempered and low-spirited. 

“Well, my boy,” his father asked 
him, blowing noisily at each spoon- 
ful of soup he absorbed, ‘‘well, did 
you enjoy yourself yesterday?” 





He answered curtly and crossly. Everything 
stirred his gorge. His aunt’s print gown filled him 
with a sort of rage. 

His father propounded a hundred minute in- 
quiries; he would fain have pictured the whole ex- 
pedition to himself as he consumed his bowl of soup. 
He had seen Saint-Cloud in his soldiering days; but 
he had never been there since. He had a bright 
idea; they would go to Versailles, the three of them; 
his sister would see to having a bit of veal cooked 
overnight, and they could take it with them. They 
would have a look at the pictures, eat their snack 
on the great lawn, and have a fine time generally. 

Jean, who was horrified at the whole project, 
opened his exercise-books and buried his head in his 
lessons, to avoid the necessity of hearing any more 

43 


44 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


and answering questions. He did not as a rule 
show such alacrity about setting to work. His 
father remarked on the fact, commending him for 
his zeal. 

‘““We should play,” he announced, “when it is 
play-time, and work when it is the time to work,” 
and he set to work flattening a piece of shagreen. 

Jean fell into a brown study. He had caught 
a glimpse of a world he knew to be for ever closed 
against him, but towards which all the forces of his 
young heart drew him irresistibly. He did not 
dream Madame Ewans could ever be different from 
what he had seen her. He could not imagine her 
otherwise dressed or amid any other surroundings. 
He knew nothing whatever of women; this one had 
seemed motherly to him, and it was a mother such 
as Madame Ewans he would have liked to have. 
But how his heart beat and his brow burned as he 
pictured this imaginary mother a reality! 

Dating from the day at Saint-Cloud, Jean thought 
himself unhappy, and unhappy he became in fact. 
He was wilfully, deliberately insubordinate, proud 
of breaking rules and defying punishments. 

He and his school-mates attended the classes of 
a Lycée in the Quartier Latin. Directly he had 


JEAN SERVIEN 45 


taken his place on the remotest bench in the well- 
warmed lecture-room, he would become absorbed in 
some sentimental novel concealed under piles of 
Latin and Greek authors. Sometimes the master, 
short-sighted as he was, would catch the culprit in 
the act. 

Still, Jean had his hours of triumph. His trans- 
lations were remarkable, not for accuracy, but at 
any rate for elegance. So, too, his compositions 
sometimes contained happy phrases that earned him 
high praise. On the theme, ‘“‘The maiden Theano 
defending Alcibiades against the incensed Athe- 
nians,’ he wrote a Latin oration that was warmly 
commended by Monsieur Duruy, the then Inspector 
of Public Instruction, and gained the young author 
some weeks of scholastic fame. 

On holidays he would roam the boulevards and 
gaze with greedy eyes at the jewels, the silks and 
satins, the bronzes, the photographs of women, dis- 
played in the shop-windows—the thousand and one 
gewgaws and frivolities of fashion that seemed to 
him to sum up the necessary conditions of happiness. 

His entry into the philosophy class was a red- 
letter day; he sported his first tall hat and smoked 
his first non-surreptitious cigarettes. He possessed 


46 JEAN SERVIEN 


a certain brilliancy of mind and a keen wit that 
amused his companions, whose superior he was in 
gifts of imagination. 

His last vacation was passed in tolerable con- 
tent. His father, thinking him looking pale, sent 
him on a visit to relatives living in a village near 
Chartres. Jean, the tedious farm dinner ended, 
would go and sit under a tree and bury himself in a 
novel. Occasionally he would ride to the city in 
the miller’s cart. Often he would be drenched all 
the way by the rain that fell drearily at nightfall. 
Then he would enjoy the fun of drying himself be- 
fore the huge fireplace of some inn on the outskirts 
of the town, beside the savoury roast on the turn- 
ing spit. He even had a day’s shooting with an 
old flint-lock fowling-piece under the auspices of his 
cousin the miller. In short, he could boast on his 


return of having had a country holiday. 


IX 


T eighteen he took his bachelor’s de- 
gree. The evening after the ex- 
amination Monsieur Servien un- 
corked a bottle with a special seal, 





which he had hoarded for years in 
anticipation of this domestic solemnity, and the con- 
tents of which had turned from red to pink as they 
slowly fined. 

“A young man who carries his diploma in his 
pocket can enter every door,” Monsieur Servien ob- 
served, as he imbibed the wine with fitting respect; 
it had been good stuff once, but was past its prime. 

Jean polished off the family repast rapidly and 
hurried away to the theatre. His only ideas as 
yet of what a play was like were derived from the 
posters he had seen. He selected for to-night one 
of the big theatres where a tragedy was on the bill. 
He took his ticket for the pit with a vague idea it 
would be the talisman admitting him to a new 
wonder-world of passion and emotion. Every 
trifle is disconcerting to a troubled spirit, and on 
his entrance he was surprised and sobered to see 
47 


48 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


how few spectators there were in the stalls and 
boxes. But at the first scraping of the violins as 
the orchestra tuned up, he glued his eyes to the 
curtain, which rose at last. 

Then, then he saw, in a Roman palace, leaning 
on the back of a chair of antique shape, a woman 
who wore over her robe of white woollen the 
saffron-hued palla. Amid the trampling of feet, 
the rustle of dresses and the shifting of stools, she 
was reciting a long soliloquy, accompanied by slow, 
deliberate gestures. He felt, as he gazed, a 
strange, unknown pleasure, that grew more and 
more acute till it was almost pain. As scene fol- 
lowed scene, there entered a confidante, then a 
hero, then a crowd of supers. But he saw nothing 
but the apparition that had first fascinated him. 
His eyes fastened greedily on her beauty, caressing 
the two bare arms, encircled with rings of metal, 
gliding along the curve of the hips below the high 
girdle, plunging amid the brown locks that waved 
above the brow and were tied back with three white 
fillets; they clung to the moving lips and the white, 
moist teeth that ever and anon flashed in the glare 
of the foot-lights. He longed to feel, to seize, to 
hold this lovely, living thing that moved before his 


\ 


JEAN SERVIEN 49 


eyes; in imagination he enfolded and embraced the 
beautiful vision. 

The wait between the acts (for the tragedy in- 
volved a change of scenery) was intolerably tedious. 
His neighbours were talking politics and passing one 
another quarters of orange across him; the news- 
paper boy and the man who hired out opera-glasses 
deafened him with their bawling. He was in terror 
of some sudden catastrophe that might interrupt 
the play. 

The curtain rose once more, on a succession of 
scenes of political intrigue a la Corneille which had 
no meaning for Servien. To his joy the lovely be- 
ing in the white robe came on again. But he had 
strained his sight too hard; he could see nothing; by 
dint of riveting his gaze on the long gold pendants 
that hung from the actress’s ears, he was dazzled; 
his eyes swam and closed involuntarily, and he could 
hear no sound but the beating of the blood in his 
temples. 

By a supreme effort, in the last scene, he saw and 
heard her again clearly and distinctly, yet not as 
with his ordinary senses, for she wore for him the 
elemental guise of a supernatural vision. When 
the prompter’s bell tinkled and the curtain descended 


50 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


for the last time, he had a feeling as though the uni- 
verse had collapsed in irretrievable ruin. 

Tartuffe was the after-piece; but neither the 
spirit and perfection of the acting nor the pretty 
face and plump shoulders of Elmire, nor the sou- 
brette’s dimpled arms, nor the ingénue’s innocent 
eyes, nor the noble, witty lines that filled the theatre 
and roused the audience to fresh attention, could 
stir his spirit that hung entranced on the lips of a 
tragic heroine. 

As he stepped out into the street, the first breath 
of the cool night air on his face blew away his intoxi- 
cation. His senses came back to him and he could 
think again; but his thoughts never left the object 
of his infatuation, and her image was the only thing 
he saw distinctly. He was entranced, possessed; 
but the feeling was delicious, and he roamed far 
and wide in the dark streets, making long detours 
by the river-side quays to lengthen out his reveries, 
his heart full, overfull of passionate, voluptuous 
imaginings. He was content because he was weary; 
his soul lay drowned in a delicious languor that no 
pang of desire troubled; to look and long was more 
than sufficient as yet to still the cravings of his 
virgin appetites. 

He threw himself half dressed on his bed, over- 


JEAN SERVIEN 51 


joyed to cherish the picture of her beauty in his 
heart. All he wanted was to lose himself in the en- 
chanted sleep that weighed down his boyish lids. 

On waking, he gazed about him for something— 
he knew not what. Washeinlove? He could not 
tell, but there was a void somewhere. Still, he felt 
no overmastering impulse, except to read the verses 
he had heard the actress declaim. He took down 
from his shelves a volume of Corneille and read 
through Emilie’s part. Every line enchanted him, 
one as much as another, for did they not all evoke 
the same memory for him? 

His father and his aunt, with whom he passed 
his days, had grown to be only vague, meaningless 
shapes to him. Their broadest pleasantries failed 
to raise a smile, and the coarse realities of a narrow, 
penurious existence had no power to disturb his 
happy serenity. All day long, in the back-shop 
where the penetrating smell of paste mingled with 
the fumes of the cabbage-soup, he lived a life of his 
own, a life of incomparable splendours. His little 
Corneille, scored thickly with thumb-nail marks at 
every couplet of Emilie’s, was all he needed to fos- 
ter the fairest of illusions. A face and the tones of 
a voice were his world. 


In a few days he knew the whole tragedy by 


52 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


heart. He would declaim the lines in a slow, pom- 
pous voice, and his aunt would remark after each 
speech, as she shredded the vegetables for dinner: 

“So you’re for being a curé, are you, that you 
preach like they do in church?” 

But in the main she approved of these exercises, 
and when Monsieur Servien scratched his head 
doubtfully and complained that his son would not 
make up his mind to any way of earning a living, 
she always took up the cudgels for the “‘little lad” 
and silenced the bookbinder by telling him roundly 
he knew nothing about it—or about anything else. 

So the worthy man went back to his calf-skins. 
All the same, albeit he could form no very clear 
idea of what was in his son’s head, for the latter 
having become a “‘gentleman” was beyond his pur- 
view, he felt some disquietude to see a holiday, 
legitimate enough no doubt after a successful exam- 
ination, dragging out to such a length. He was 
anxious to see his son earning money in some de- 
partment of administration or other. He had 
heard speak of the Hotel de Ville and the Govern- 
ment Offices, and he racked his brains to think of 
some one among his customers who might interest 
himself in his son’s future. But he was not the 


man to act precipitately. 


JEAN SERVIEN 53 


One day, when Jean Servien was out on one of 
the long walks he had got into the habit of taking, 
he read on a poster that his Emilie, Mademoiselle 
Gabrielle T- 
piece. This time, ignoring his aunt’s disapproval, 
he donned his Sunday clothes, had his hair frizzed 
and curled, and took his seat in the orchestra stalls. 





, Was appearing in that evening’s 


He saw her again! For the first few moments 
she did not seem so beautiful as he had pictured 
her. So long had he laboured and lain awake over 
the first image he had carried away of her that the 
impression had become blurred, and the type that 
had originally imprinted it on his heart no longer 
corresponded with the result created by his mind’s 
unconscious working. Then he was disconcerted to 
see neither the white stola and saffron mantle nor 
the bracelets and fillets that had seemed to him part 
and parcel of the beauty they adorned. Now she 
wore the turban of Roxana and the wide muslin 
trousers caught in at the ankle. It was only by de- 
grees he could grow reconciled to the change. He 
realized that her arms were a trifle thin, and that a 
tooth stood back behind the rest in the row of 
pearls. But in the end her very defects pleased 
him, because they were hers, and he loved her the 
better for them. This time, by the law of change 


54 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


which is of the very essence of life, and by virtue of 
the imperfection that characterizes all living crea- 
tures, she made a physical appeal to his senses and 
called up the idea of a human being of flesh and 
blood, a creature you could cling to and make one 
with yourself. His admiration was lost in a flood 
of tenderness and infinite sadness—and he burst 
into tears. 

The next day he conceived a great desire to see 
her as she was in everyday life, dressed for the 
streets. It would be a sort of intimacy merely to 
pass her on the pavement. One evening, when she 
was playing, he watched for her at the stage-door, 
through which emerged one after the other scene- 
shifters, actors, constables, firemen, dressers, and 
actresses. At last she appeared, muffled in her fur 
cloak, a bouquet in her hand, tall and pale—so pale 
in the dusk her face seemed to him as if illumined 
by an inward light. She stood waiting on the door- 
step till a carriage was called. 

He clasped both hands on his breast and thought 
he was going to die. 

When he found himself alone on the deserted 
Quai, he plucked a leaf from the overhanging bough 
of a plane tree. Then, setting his elbows on the 
parapet of the bridge, he tossed the leaf into the 


JEAN SERVIEN 55 


river and watched it borne away by the current of 
the stream that lay silvery in the moonlight, span- 
gled with quivering lights. He watched it till he 
could see it no longer. Was it not the emblem of 
himself? He, too, was abandoning himself to the 
waters of a passion that shone bright and which he 
thought profound. 


X 
aK hisses year the Champ de Mars was 


occupied by one of the series of Ex- 
positions Universelles. Under the 
trees, in the heat and dust, crowds 





were swarming towards the entrance. 
= ae ae turnstiles and entered the palace of 
glass and iron. He was still pursuing his passion, 
for he associated the being he loved with all mani- 
festations of art and luxury. He made for the 
park and went straight to the Egyptian pavilion. 
Egypt had filled his dreams from the day when all 
his thoughts had been centered on one woman. In 
the avenue of sphinxes and before the painted tem- 
ple he fell under the glamour that women of olden 
days and strange lands exercise on the senses,—on 
those of lovers with especial force. The sanctuary 
was venerable in his eyes, despite the vulgar use it 
was put to as part of the Exhibition. Looking at 
the jewels of Queen Aahotep, who lived and was 
lovely in the days of the Patriarchs, he pondered 
sadly over all that had been in the world and was 
no more. He pictured in fancy the black locks that 
57 


58 JEAN SERVIEN 


had scented this diadem with the sphinx’s head, the 
slim brown arms these beads of gold and lapis lazuli 
had touched, the shoulders that had worn these vul- 
ture’s wings, the peaked bosoms these chains and 
gorgets had confined, the breast that had once com- 
municated its warmth to yonder gold scarabeus with 
the blue wing-cases, the little royal hand that once 
held that poniard by the hilt wrought over with 
flowers and women’s faces. He could not conceive 
how what was a dream to him had been a reality for 
other men. Vainly he tried to follow the lapse of 
ages. He told himself that another living shape 
would vanish in its turn, and it would be for noth- 
ing then that it had been so passionately desired. 
The thought saddened and calmed him. He 
thought, as he stood before these gewgaws from 
the tomb, of all these men who, in the abyss of by- 
gone time, had in turn loved, coveted, enjoyed, suf- 
fered, whom death had taken, hungry or satiated, 
and made an end of the appetites of all alike. <A 
placid melancholy swept over him and held him mo- 


tionless, his face buried in his hands. 


XI 


T was at breakfast the next morning 
that Jean noticed, for the first time, 
Va the venerable, kindly look of his fath- 
WA er’s face. In truth, advancing years 

Ones: invested the bookbinder’s ap- 
pearance with a sort of beauty. The smooth fore- 
head under the curling white locks betokened a habit 
of peaceful and honest thoughts. Old age, while 
rendering the play of the muscles less active, veiled 
the distortion of the limbs due to long hours of 
labour at the bench under the more affecting dis- 
figurements which life and its long-drawn labours 





impress on all men alike. The old man had read, 
thought, striven honestly to do his best, and won the 
saving grace a simple faith bestows on the humble 
of heart; for he had become a religious man and a 
regular attendant at the church of his parish. Jean 
told himself it would be an easy and a grateful task 
to cherish such a father, and he resolved to inaugu- 
rate a life of toil and sacrifice. But he had no em- 
ployment and no notion what to do. 

Shut up in his room, he was filled with a great 

59 


60 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


pity for himself and longed to recover the peace of 
mind, the calm of the senses, the happy life that had 
vanished along with the leaf he had abandoned that 
evening to the drifting current. He opened a 
novel, but at the first mention of love he pitched the 
volume down, and fell to reading a book of travel, 
following the steps of an English explorer into the 
reed palace of the King of Uganda. He ascended 
the Upper Nile to Urondogami; hippopotamuses 
snorted in the swamps, waders and guinea-fowl rose 
in flight, while a herd of antelopes sped flying 
through the tall grasses. He was recalled from 
far, far away by his aunt shouting up the stairs: 

‘Jean! Jean! come down into the shop; your 
father wants you.” 

A stout, red-faced man, with the bent shoulders 
that come of much stooping over the desk, sat be- 
side the counter. Monsieur Servien’s eves rested on 
his face with a deprecating air. 

When the boy appeared, the stranger asked if 
this was the young man in question, adding in a 
scolding voice: 

“You are allthe same. You work and sweat and 
wear yourselves out to make your sons bachelors of 


arts, and you think the day after the examination 


JEAN SERVIEN 61 


the fine fellows will be posted Ambassadors. For 
God’s sake! no more graduates, if you please! We 
can’t tell what to do with ’em. . . . Graduates in- 
deed! Why, they block the road; they are cab- 
drivers, they distribute handbills in the streets. 
You have ’em dying in hospital, rotting in the 
hulks! Why didn’t you teach your son your own 
trade? Why didn’t you make a bookbinder of 
him? . . . Oh! I know why; you needn’t tell me, 
—out of ambition! Well, then! some day your son 
will die of starvation, blushing for your folly—and 
a good job too! The State! you say, the State! it’s 
the only word you can put your tongues to. But 
it’s cluttered up, the State is! Take the Treasury; 
you send us graduates who can’t spell; what d’ye 
expect us to do with all these loafers?” 

He drew his hand across his hot forehead. Then 
pointing a finger to show he was addressing Jean: 

“At any rate, you write a good hand?” 

Monsieur Servien answered for his son, saying it 
was legible. 

“Legible! legible!” repeated the great man— 
throwing his fat hands about. “A copying clerk 
must write an even hand. Young man, do you 
write an even hand?” 


62 THE. ASPIRATIONS OF 


Jean said he did not know, his handwriting might 
have been spoilt, he had never thought very much 
about it. His questioner frowned: 

‘“‘That’s very wrong,” he blustered; ‘‘and I dare 
swear you young fellows make a silly affectation of 
not writing decently. . . . I may have a bit of in- 
fluence at the Ministry, but you mustn't ask me to 
do impossibilities.”’ 

The bookbinder shrunk back with a scared glance. 
He certainly did not look the man to ask impossi- 
bilities. 

The other got up: 

‘You will take lessons,” he said, turning to Jean, 
“in writing and ciphering. You have eight months 
before you. Eight months from now the Minister 
will hold an examination. I will put your name 
down. Do you set to work without losing a min- 
ute!” 

So saying, he pulled out his watch, as though to 
see if his protégé was actually going to waste a 
single minute before beginning his studies. He di- 
rected Monsieur Servien to get to work without de- 
lay on the books he was giving him to bind, and 
walked out of the shop. After the bookbinder had 
seen him to his carriage: 

‘Jean, my boy,” said he, “‘that is Monsieur Barge- 


JEAN SERVIEN 63 


mont; I have spoken to him about you and you have 
heard what he had to say; he is going to help you 
to get into the Treasury Office, where he holds a 
high post. You understand what he told you about 
the examinations; you know more about such things, 
praise God! than I do. I am only an ignoramus, 
my lad, but I am your father. Now listen; I want 
to have a word of explanation with you, so that 
from this day on till I go where your dear mother 
is we can look each other calmly in the face and 
understand one another at the first glance. Your 
mother loved you right well, Jean. There’s not a 
gold mine in the world could give a notion of the 
wealth of affection that woman possessed. From 
the first moment you saw the light, she lived, so to 
say, more in you than in herself. Her love was 
stronger than she could bear. Well, well, she is 
dead. It was nobody’s fault.” 

The old man turned his eyes involuntarily to- 
wards the darkest corner of the shop, and Jean, 
looking in the same direction, caught sight of the 
sharp angles of the hand-press in the gloom. 

Monsieur Servien went on: 3 

“On her death-bed your mother asked me to 
make an educated man of you, for well she knew 
that education is the key that opens every door. 


64 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


“T have done what she wished. She was no 
longer with us, Jean, and when a voice comes back 
to you from the grave and bids you do a thing ‘that 
a blessing may come,’ why, one must needs obey. 
I did my best; and no doubt God was with me, for 
I have succeeded. You have your education; so far 
so good, but we must not have a blessing turn into 
a curse. And idleness is a curse. I have worked 
like a packhorse, and given many a hard pull at the 
collar, in harness from morning to night. I remem- 
ber in particular one lot of cloth covers for the 
firm of Pigoreau that kept me on the job for thirty- 
six hours running. And then there was the year 
when your examination fees had to be paid and I 
accepted an order in the English style; it was a ter- 
rible bit of work, for it’s not in my way at all, and 
at my time of life a man is not good at new meth- 
ods. They wanted a light sort of binding, with 
flexible boards as flimsy as paper almost. I shed 
tears over it, but I learned the trick! Ah! it is a 
famous tool, is a workman’s hand! But an edu- 
cated man’s brain is a far more wonderful thing 
still, and that tool you have, thanks to God in the 
first place, and to your mother in the second. It 
was she had the notion of educating you, I only 


JEAN SERVIEN 65 


followed her lead. Your work will be lighter than 
mine, but you must do it. I ama poor man, as you 
know; but, were I rich, I would not give you the 
means to lead an idle life, because that would be 
tempting you to vices and shaming you. Ah! if I 
thought your education had given you a taste for 
idleness, I should be sorry not to have made you a 
working man like myself. But then, I know you 
have a good heart; you have not got into your stride 
yet, that’s all! The first steps will be uphill work; 
Monsieur Bargemont said so. The State services 
are overcrowded; there are over many graduates 
—though it is well enough to be one. Besides, I 
shall be at your back; I will help you, I will work for 
you; I have a pair of stout arms still. You shall 
have pocket-money, never fear; you will want it 
among the folks you will live with. We will save 
and pinch. But you must help yourself lad; never 
be afraid of hard work, hit out from the shoulder 
and strike home. Good work never spoiled play 
yet. Your job done, laugh and sing and amuse 
yourself to your heart’s content; you won't find me 
interfere. And, when you are a great man, if I am 
still in this world, don’t you be afraid; I shall not 
get in your way. I amnota fellow to make a noise. 


66 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


We will hide away in some quiet hole, your aunt and 
I, and nobody will hear one word said of the old 
father.” 

Aunt Servien, who had slipped into the shop and 
been listening for the last few moments, broke into 
sobs; she was quite ready to follow her brother and 
hide away in a corner; but when her nephew had 
risen to greatness, she would insist on going every 
day to keep things straight in his grand house. 
She was not going to leave “‘the little lad” to be a 
prey to housekeepers—housekeepers, indeed, she 
called them housebreakers! 

“The creatures keep great hampers,” she de- 
clared, ‘“‘that swallow up bottles of wine, cold chick- 
ens, and other titbits, fine linen, old clothes, oil, 
sugar, and candles—the best pickings from a rich 
man’s house. No, I'll not let my little Jean be 
sucked to death by such vampires. J mean to keep 
your house in order. No one will ever know I am 
your aunt. And if they did know, there’s nobody, 
I should hope, could object. I don’t know why any 
one should be ashamed of me. ‘They can lay my 
whole life bare, I have nothing to blush for. And 
there’s many a Duchess can’t say as much. As for 
forsaking the lad for fear of doing him a hurt, well, 


the notion is just what I expected of you, Servien; 


JEAN SERVIEN 67 


you’ve always been a bit simple-minded. J mean 
to stay all my life with Jean. No, little lad, you'll 
never drive your old aunt out of your house, will 
you? And who could ever make your bed the way 
I can, my lamb?” 

Jean promised his father faithfully, oh! most 
faithfully, he would lead a hardworking life. Then 
he shut himself up in his room and pictured the fu- 
ture to himself—long years of austere and method- 
ical labour. 

He mapped out his days systematically. In the 
morning he wrote copies to improve his handwriting, 
seated at a corner of the workbench. After break- 
fast he did sums in his bedroom. Every evening 
he went to the Rue Soufflot by way of the Luxem- 
bourg gardens to a private tutor’s, and the old man 
would set him dictations and explain the rules of 
simple interest. On reaching the gate adjoining 
the Fontaine Médicis the boy always turned round 
for a look at the statues of women he could discern 
standing like white ghosts along the terrace. He 
had left behind on the path of life another fascinat- 
Ing vision. 

He never read a theatrical poster now, and de- 
liberately forgot his favourite poets for fear of re- 


newing his pain. 





XII 


MHIS new life pleased him; it slipped 
by with a soothing monotony, and he 
found it healthful and to his taste. 





downstairs at his old tutor’s, a stout 
man offered him, with a sweep of the arm, the bill 
of fare advertising a neighbouring cook-shop; he 
carried a huge bundle of them under his left arm. 
Then stopping abruptly: 

“Per Bacco!” cried the fellow; “‘it is my old pupil. 
Tall and straight as a young poplar, here stands 
Monsieur Jean Servien!”’ 

It was no other than the Marquis Tudesco. His 
red waistcoat was gone; instead he wore a sort of 
sleeved vest of coarse ticking, but his shining face, 
with the little round eyes and hooked nose, still 
wore the same look of merry, mischievous alertness 
that was so like an old parrot’s. 

Jean was surprised to see him, and not ill-pleased 
after all. He greeted him affectionately and asked 
what he was doing now. 

“Behold!” replied the Marquis, ‘‘my business is 
69 


70 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


to distribute in the streets these advertisements of 
a local poisoner, and thereby to earn a place at the 
assassin’s table to spread the fame of which [I la- 
bour. Camoens held out his hand for charity in 
the streets of Lisbon. Tudesco stretches forth his 
in the byways of the modern Babylon, but it is to 
give and not to receive—lunches at 1 fr. 25, dinners 
at 1 fr. 75,’ and he offered one of his bills to a pass- 
erby, who strode on, hands in pockets, without tak- 
ing it. 

Thereupon the Marquis Tudesco heaved a sigh 
and exclaimed: 

“And yet I have translated the Gerusalemme 
Liberata, the masterpiece of the immortal Tor- 
quato Tasso! But the brutal-minded booksellers 
scorn the fruit of my vigils, and in the empyrean 
the Muse veils her face so as not to witness the 
humiliation inflicted on her nursling.” 

“And what has become of you all the time since 
we last saw you?” asked the young man frankly. 

“God only knows, and ’pon my word! I think 
He has forgotten.” 

Such was the Marquis Tudesco’s oracular answer. 

He tied up his bundle of papers in a cloth, and 
taking his pupil by the arm, urged him in the direc- 


tion of the Rue Saint-Jacques. 


JEAN SERVIEN 71 


‘See, my young friend,” he said, ‘“‘the dome of 
the Panthéon is half hidden by the fog. The 
School of Salerno teaches that the damp air of eve- 
ning is inimical to the human stomach. There is 
near by a decent establishment where we can con- 
verse as two philosophers should, and I feel sure 
your unavowed desire is to conduct your old in- 
structor thither, the master who initiated you in the 
Latin rudiments.” 

They entered a drinking-shop perfumed with so 
strong a reek of kirsch and absinthe as took Ser- 
vien’s breath away. The room was long and nar- 
row, while against the walls varnished barrels with 
copper taps were ranged in a long-drawn perspec- 
tive that was lost in the thick haze of tobacco-smoke 
hanging in the air under the gas-jets. At little 
tables of painted deal a number of men were drink- 
ing; dressed in black and wearing tall silk hats, 
broken-brimmed and shiny from exposure to the 
rain, they sat and smoked in silence. Before the 
door of the stove several pairs of thin legs were 
extended to catch the heat, and a thread of steam 
curled up from the toes of the owners’ boots. A 
heavy torpor seemed to weigh upon all this assem- 
blage of pallid, impassive faces. 

While Monsieur Tudesco was distributing hand- 


72 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


shakes to sundry old acquaintances, Jean caught 
scraps of the conversation of those about him that 
filled him with a despairing melancholy—school 
ushers railing at the cookery of cheap eating-houses, 
tipplers maundering contentedly to one another, en- 
chanted at the profundity of their own wisdom, 
schemers planning to make a fortune, politicians 
arguing, amateurs of the fair sex telling highly- 
spiced anecdotes of love and women—and amongst 
it all this sentence: 

‘The harmony of the spheres fills the spaces of 
infinity, and if we hear it not, it is because, as Plato 
says, our ears are stopped with earth.” 

Monsieur Tudesco consumed brandy-cherries in 
a very. elegant way. Then the waiter served two 
dantzigs in little glass cups. Jean admired the 
translucent liquor dotted with golden sparkles, and 
Monsieur Tudesco demanded two more. ‘Then, 
raising his cup on high: 

“JT drink to the health of Monsieur Servien, your 
venerable father,’ he cried. ‘‘He enjoys a green 
and flourishing old age, at least I hope so; he is a 
man superior to his mechanic and mercantile condi- 
tion by the benevolence of his behaviour to needy 
men of letters. And your respected aunt? She 


JEAN SERVIEN 73 


still knits stockings with the same zeal as of yore? 
At least I hope so. A lady of an austere virtue. I 
conjecture you are wishing to order another dant- 
zig, my young friend.” 

Jean looked about him. The dram-shop was 
transfigured; the casks looked enormous with their 
taps splendidly glittering, and seemed to stretch into 
infinity in a quivering, golden mist. But one object 
was more monstrously magnified than all the rest, 
and that was the Marquis Tudesco; the old man 
positively towered as huge as the giant of a fairy- 
tale, and Jean looked for him to do wonders. 

Tudesco was smiling. 

“You do not drink, my young friend,” he re- 
sumed. “I conjecture you are in love. Ah! love! 
love is at once the sweetest and the bitterest thing 
on earth. I too have felt my heart beat for a 
woman. But it is long years ago since I outlived 
that passion. I am now an old man crushed under 
adverse fortune; but in happier days there was at 
Rome a diva of a beauty so magnificent and a genius 
so enthralling that cardinals fought to the death at 
the door of her box; well, sir, that sublime creature 
I have pressed to my bosom, and I have been in- 
formed since that with her last sigh she breathed 


74 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


myname. Iam like an old ruined temple, degraded 
by the passage of time and the violence of men’s 
hands, yet sanctified for ever by the goddess.”’ 

This tale, whether it recalled in exaggerated 
terms some commonplace intrigue of his young days 
in Italy, or more likely was a pure fiction based on 
romantic episodes he had read in novels, was ac- 
cepted by Jean as authentic and vastly impressive. 
The effect was startling, amazing. In an instant 
he beheld, with all the miraculous clearness of a 
vision, there, standing between the tables, the queen 
of tragedy he adored; he saw the locks braided in 
antique fashion, the long gold pendants drooping 
from either ear, the bare arms and the white face 
with scarlet lips. And he cried aloud: 

“T too love an actress.” 

He was drinking, never heeding what the liquor 
was; but lo! it was a philtre he swallowed that re- 
vivified his passion. Then a torrent of words rose 
flooding to his lips. The plays he had seen, Cinna, 
Bajazet, the stern beauty of Emilie, the sweet fe- 
rocity of Roxana, the sight of the actress cloaked in 
velvet, her face shining so pale and clear in the 
darkness, his longings, his hopes, his undying love, 
he recounted everything with cries and tears. 

Monsieur Tudesco heard him out, lapping up a 


JEAN SERVIEN a5 


glass of Chartreuse drop by drop the while, and tak- 
ing snuff from a screw of paper. At times he would 
nod his head in approval and go on listening with 
the air of a man watching and waiting his oppor- 
tunity. When he judged that at last, after tedious 
repetitions and numberless fresh starts, the other’s 
confidences were exhausted, he assumed a look of 
gravity, and laying his fine hand with a gesture as 
of priestly benediction on the young man’s shoulder: 

‘Ah! my young friend,” he said, “if I thought 
that what you feel were true love . . . but I do 
not,” and he shook his head and let his hand drop. 

Jean protested. To suffer so, and not to be 
really in love? 

Monsieur Tudesco repeated: 

“If I thought that this were true love . . . but 
Edo no0tso tar: 

Jean answered with great vehemence; he talked 
of death and plunging a dagger in his heart. 

Monsieur Tudesco reiterated for the third time: 

“T do not believe it is true love.” 

Then Jean fell into a fury and began to rumple 
and tear at his waistcoat as if he would bare his 
heart for inspection. Monsieur Tudesco took his 
hands and addressed him soothingly: 

“Well, well, my young friend, since it is true love 


76 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


you feel, I will help you. I am a great tactician, 
and if King Carlo Alberto had read a certain me- 
morial I sent him on military matters he would have 
won the battle of Novara. He did not read my 
memorial, and the battle was lost, but it was a 
glorious defeat. How happy the sons of Italy who 
died for their mother in that thrice holy battle! 
The hymns of poets and the tears of women made 
enviable their obsequies. I say it: what a noble, 
what a heroic thing is youth! What flames divine 
escape from young bosoms to rise to the Creator! 
I admire above everything young folk who throw 
themselves into ventures of war and sentiment with 
the impetuosity natural to their age.”’ 

Tasso, Novara, and the diva so beloved of car- 
dinals mingled confusedly in Jean Servien’s heated 
brain, and in a burst of sublime if fuddled enthu- 
siasm he wrung the old villain’s hand. Everything 
had grown indistinct; he seemed to be swimming in 
an element of molten metal. 

Monsieur Tudesco, who at the moment was im- 
bibing a glass of kimmel, pointed to his waistcoat 
of ticking. 

“The misfortune is,’ he observed, “that I am 
garbed like a philosopher. How show myself in 
such a costume among elegant females? ’Tis a sad 


JEAN SERVIEN 77 


pity! for it would be an easy’matter for me to pay 
my respects to an actress at an important theatre. 
I have translated the Gerusalemme Liberata, that 
masterpiece of Torquato Tasso’s. I could pro- 
pose to the great actress whom you love and who is 
worthy of your love, at least I hope so, a French 
adaptation of the Myrrha of the celebrated Alfieri. 
What eloquence, what fire in that tragedy! The 
part of Myrrha is sublime and terrible; she will be 
eager to play it. Meantime, you translate Myrrha 
into French verse; then I introduce you with your 
manuscript into the sanctuary of Melpomene, when 
you bring with you a double gift—fame and love! 
What a dream, oh! fortunate young man!.. . 
But alas! ’tis but a dream, for how should I enter 
a lady’s boudoir in this rude and sordid guise ?” 

But the tavern was closing and they had to leave. 
Jean felt so giddy in the open air he could not tell 
how he had come to lose Monsieur Tudesco, after 
emptying the contents of his purse into the latter’s 
hand. 

He wandered about all night in the rain, stum- 
bling through the puddles which splashed up the 
mud in his face. His brains buzzed with the mad- 
dest schemes, that took shape, jostled one another, 


and tumbled to pieces in his head. Sometimes he 


78 JEAN SERVIEN 


would stop to wipe the sweat from his forehead, 
then start off again on his wild way. Fatigue 
calmed his nerves, and a clear purpose emerged. 
He went straight to the house where the actress 
lived, and from the street gazed up at her dark, 
shuttered windows; then, stepping up to the porte- 
cochére, he kissed the great doors. 


XIII 


IF A from that night Jean Ser- 


3 i 


vien spent his days in translating 
Myrrha bit by bit, with an infinity 
of pains. The task having taught 





him something of verse-making, he 
composed an ode, which he sent by post to his mis- 
tress. The poem was writ in tears of blood, yet it 
was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy’s exercise. 
Still, he did get something said of the fair vision of 
a woman that hovered for ever before his eyes, and 
of the door he had kissed in a night of frenzy. 

Monsieur Servien was disturbed to note how his 
son had grown heedless, absent-minded, and hollow- 
eyed, coming back late at night, and hardly up be- 
fore noon. Before the mute reproach in his fath- 
er’s eyes the boy hung his head. But his home-life 
was nothing now; his whole thoughts were abroad, 
hovering around the unknown, in regions he pic- 
tured as resplendent with poetry, wealth and 
pleasure. 

Occasionally, at a street corner, he would meet 
the Marquis Tudesco again. He had found it im- 
79 


80 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


possible to replace his waistcoat of ticking. More- 
over, he now advised Jean to pay his addresses to 
shop-girls. 

When the summer came, the theatrical posters 
announced in quick succession Mithridate, Adrienne 
Lecouvreur, Rodogune, les Enfants d’Edouard, la 
Fiammina. Jean, having secured the money to pay 
for a seat by hook or by crook, by some bit of trick- 
ery or falsehood, by cajoling his aunt or by a sur- 
reptitious raid on the cash-box, would watch from 
an orchestra stall the startling metamorphoses of 
the woman he loved. He saw her now girt with 
the white fillet of the virgins of Hellas, like those 
figures carved with such an exquisite purity in the 
marble of the Greek bas-reliefs that they seem clad 
in inviolate innocence, now in a flowered gown, with 
powdered ringlets sweeping her naked shoulders, 
that had an inexpressible charm in their spare out- 
lines suggestive of the bitter-sweet taste of an un- 
ripe fruit. She reminded him in this attire of some 
old-time pastel of gallant ladies such as the book- 
binder’s son had pored over in the dealers’ shops on 
the Quai Voltaire. Anon she would be crowned 
with a hawk’s crest, girdled with plaques of gold on 
which were traced magic symbols in clustered rubies, 
clad in the barbaric splendour of an Eastern queen; 


JEAN SERVIEN 81 


presently she would be wearing the black hood, 
pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe 
of a Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen 
guarded as holy relics in a chamber of the Louvre; 
last travesty of all (and it was in this guise he found 
her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman, 
clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a 
man’s hat set rakishly on her dainty head. He 
would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, 
and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians, Cor- 
neille, Shakespeare, Voltaire’s verses on the death of 
Adrienne Lecouvreur, and whatever in modern lit- 
erature appealed to him as elegant or fraught with 
passion. But in all these creations it was one im- 
age, and one only, that he saw. 

Going one evening to the dram-shop with the 
Marquis Tudesco, who had given up all idea of 
discarding his checked waistcoat, he made the ac- 
quaintance of an old man whose white hair lay in 
ringlets on his shoulders and who still had the blue 
eyes of a child. He was an architect fallen to ruin 
along with the little Gothic erections he had raised 
at great expense in the Paris suburbs about 1840. 
His name was Théroulde, and the old fellow, whose 
smiling face belied his wretched condition, over- 


flowed with anecdotes of artists and pretty women. 


82 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


In his prosperous days he had, built country villas 
for actresses and attended many a joyous house- 
warming, the fun and frolic of which were still 
fresh in the light-hearted veteran’s memory. He 
had long ceased to care who heard him, and primed 
with maraschino, he would unfold his reminiscences 
like some sumptuous tapestry gone to tatters. The 
bookseller’s son, meeting an artist for the first time, 
listened to the old Bohemian with rapt enthusiasm. 
All these forgotten celebrities, or half-celebrities, 
all these old young beauties of whom Théroulde 
spoke, came to life again for him, fascinated him 
with an unexpected charm and a piquant sense of 
familiarity. Servien pictured them as he had seen 
them represented in the old foxed lithographs that 
litter the second-hand bookstalls along the Quais, 
wearing the hair in flat bandeaux with a jewel on a 
gold chain in the middle of the forehead, or else in 
heavy ringlets a1’ Anglaise brushing the cheeks. Ob- 
sessed by his one idea, he endeavoured to recall one 
who seemed so well acquainted with ladies of the 
stage to the present day. He spoke of tragedy, but 
Théroulde said he thought that sort of plays ridicu- 
lous, and repeated a number of parodies. Jean 
mentioned Gabrielle T : 





JEAN SERVIEN 83 





ab ,”’ exclaimed the artist-architect; “I knew 
her mother well.” 

Never in all his life had Jean heard a sentence 
that interested him so profoundly. 

“IT knew her in 1842,” Théroulde went on, ‘“‘at 
Nantes, where she created fourteen roles in six 
weeks. And folks imagine actresses have nothing 
todo! AQ fine thing, the stage! But the mischief 
is, there’s not a single architect capable of building 
a playhouse with any sense. As to scenery, it is 
simply puerile, even at the Opera—so childish it 
might make a South Sea Islander blush. I have 
thought out a system of rollers in the flies so as to 
get rid of those long top-cloths that represent the 
sky without a pretence at deceiving any one. I 
have likewise invented an arrangement of lamps and 
reflectors so placed as to light the characters on the 
stage from above downwards, as the sun does, which 
is the rational way, and not from below upwards, 
as the footlights do, which is absurd.” 

“Of course iteis; agreed servien.. “But -you 


*s mother.”’ 





were speaking of Gabrielle T: 


‘“‘She was a fine woman,” 


“tall, dark, with a little moustache that became her 


replied the architect; 


to perfection. . . . You see the effect of my roller 


84 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


contrivance—a vast sky shedding an equal illumina- 
tion over the actors and giving every object its nat- 
ural shadows. La Muette is being played, we will 
say; the famous cavatina, the slumber-song, is heard 
beneath a transparent sky, vaulted like the real 
thing and giving the impression of boundless space. 
The effect of the music is doubled! Fenella wakes, 
crosses the boards with cadenced tread; her shadow, 
which follows her on the floor, is cadenced like her 
steps; it is nature and art both together. That is 
my invention! As for putting it in execution, why, 
the means are childishly simple.” 

Thereupon he entered upon endless explanations, 
using technical terms and illustrating his meaning 
with everything he could lay hands on—glasses, 
saucers, matches. His frayed sleeves, as they 
swept to and fro, wiped the marble top of the table 
and set the glasses rattling. Disturbed by the 
noise, the Marquis Tudesco, who was asleep, half 
opened his eyes mechanically. 

Servien kept nodding his approval and repeating 
that he quite understood, to stop the old man’s 
babble. Then he advised the architect to try and 
put his invention in practice; but he only shrugged 
his shoulders—it was years since he had left off try- 
ing anything. After all, what did it matter to him 


JEAN SERVIEN 85 


whether his system was applied or no? He was an 
inventor! 

Recalled for the third time by his young listener 
to Gabrielle T. 


‘She never had any great success on the stage,”’ 


’s mother: 





he declared; ‘“‘but she was a careful woman and 
saved money. She was near on fifty when I came 
upon her again in Paris living with Adolphe, a very 
handsome young fellow of twenty-five or twenty-six, 
nephew of a stockbroker. It was the most loving 
couple, the merriest, happiest household in the 
world. Never once did I breakfast at their little 
flat, fifth floor of a house in the Rue Taitbout, with- 
out being melted to tears. ‘Eat, my kitten,’ ‘Drink, 
my lamb!’ and such looks and endearments, and 
each so pleased with the other! One day he said 
to her: ‘My kitten, your money does not bring 
you in what it ought; give me your scrip and in 
forty-eight hours I shall have doubled your capital.’ 
She went softly to her cupboard and opening the 
glass doors, handed him her securities one by one 
with hands that trembled a little. 

“He took them unconcernedly and brought her a 
receipt tie same evening bearing his uncle’s signa- 
ture. Three months after she was pocketing a very 
handsome income. The sixth month Adolphe dis- 


86 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


appeared. The old girl goes straight to the uncle 
with her screed of paper. ‘I never signed that,’ 
says the stockbroker, ‘and my nephew never depos- 
ited any securities with me.’ She flies like a mad- 
woman to the Commissary of Police, to learn that 
Adolphe, hammered at the Bourse, is off to Belgium, 
carrying with him a hundred and twenty thousand 
francs he had done another old woman out of. She 
never got over the blow; but we must say this of 
her, she brought up her daughter mighty strictly, 
and showed herself a very dragon of virtue. Poor 
Gabrielle must feel her cheeks burn to this day only 
to think of her years at the Conservatoire; for in 
those days her mother used to smack them soundly 
for her, morning and evening. Gabrielle, why I 
can see her now, in her skyblue frock, running to 
lessons nibbling coffee-berries between her teeth. 
She was a good girl, that.” 

“You knew her!’ cried Jean, for whom these 
confidences formed the most exciting love adventure 
he had ever known. 

The old man assured him: 

“We used to have fine rides with her, and a lot 
of artists in old days on horseback and donkey-back 
in the woods of Ville d’Avray; she used to dress as 


a man, and I remember one day .. .”’ He finished 


JEAN SERVIEN 87 


his story in a whisper,—it was just as well. He 
went on to say he hardly ever saw her now that she 
was with Monsieur Didier, of the Crédit Bourgui- 
gnon. The financier had sent the artists to the 
right-about; he was a conceited, narrow-minded fel- 
low, a dull, tiresome prig. 

Jean was neither surprised nor excessively 
shocked to hear that she had a lover, because hav- 
ing studied the ways of the ladies of the theatre in 
the proverbs in verse of Alfred de Musset, he pic- 
tured the life of Parisian actresses without excep- 
tion as one continual feast of wit and gallantry. 
He loved her; with or without Didier, he loved her. 
She might have had three hundred lovers, like Les- 
bia,—he would have loved her just as much. Is it 
not always so with men’s passions? ‘They are in 
love because they are in love, and in spite of every- 
thing. 

As for feeling jealousy of Monsieur Didier, he 
never so much as thought of it. The infatuation of 
the lad! He was jealous of the men and women 
who saw her pass to and fro in the street, of the 
scene-shifters and workmen whom the business of 
the stage brought into contact with her. For the 
present these were his only rivals. For the rest, he 
trusted to the future, the ineffable future big 


88 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


whether with bliss or torment. Indeed, the litera- 
ture of romance had inspired him with no small 
esteem of courtesans, if only their attitude was as it 
should be—leaning pensively on the balcony-rail of 
their marble palace. 

What did shock him in the rapscallion architect’s 
stories, what wounded his love without weakening 
it, was all the rather squalid elements these nar- 
ratives implied in the actress’s young days. Of all 
things in the world he thought anything sordid the 
most repugnant. 

Monsieur Tudesco, feeling sure his brandy- 
cherries would be paid for, did not trouble himself 
to talk, and the conversation was languishing when 
the architect remarked casually: 

‘“By-the-by! As I was going to Bellevue yester- 
day on business of my own, I came upon that actress 
of yours, young man, at her gate . . . oh! a rub- 
bishy little villa, run up to last through a love 
affair, standing in six square yards of garden, meant 
to give a stockbroker some sort of notion what the 
country’s like. She invited me in—but what was 
the tse?’ ". 

She was at Bellevue! Jean forgot all the hu- 
miliating details the old man had told him, retaining 
the one fact only, that she was at Bellevue and it 


JEAN SERVIEN 89 


was possible to see her there in the sweet intimacy 
of the country. 

He got up to go. Monsieur Tudesco caught him 
by the skirt of his jacket to detain him: 

“My young friend, you have my admiration; for 
I see you rise on daring pinions above the hindrances 
of a lowly station to the realms of beauty, fame and 
wealth. You will yet cull the splendid blossom that 
fascinates you, at least I hope so. But how much 
better had you loved a simple work-girl, whose 
affections you could have beguiled by offering her a 
penn’orth of fried potatoes and a seat among the 
gods to see a melodrama. I fear you are a dupe of 
men’s opinion, for one woman is not very different 
from another, and it is opinion, that mistress of the 
world, and nothing else, which sets a high price on 
some and a low one on others. Do you profit, my 
young and very dear friend, by the experience af- 
forded me by the vicissitudes of fortune, which are 
such that I am obliged at this present moment to 
borrow of you the modest sum of two and a half 
francs.” 


So spake the Marquis Tudesco. 





XIV 


Ren EAN had trudged afoot up the hill of 


Bellevue. Evening was falling. 





A The village street ran upwards be- 
(33 tween low walls, brambles and this- 
(3 tles lining the roadway on either side. 
In front the woods melted into a far-off blue haze; 
below him stretched the city, with its river, its roofs, 
its towers and domes, the vast, smoky town which 
had kindled Servien’s aspirations at the flaring 
lights of its theatres and nurtured his feverish long- 
ings in the dust of its streets. In the west a broad 
streak of purple lay between heaven and earth. A 
sweet sense of peace descended on the landscape as 
the first stars twinkled faintly in the sky. But it 
was not peace Jean Servien had come to find. 

A few more paces on the stony high road and 
there stood the gate festooned with the tendrils of 
a wild vine, just as it had been described to him. 

He gazed long, in a trance of adoration. Peer- 
ing through the bars, between the sombre boughs of 
a Judas tree, he saw a pretty little white house with 
a flight of stone steps before the front door, flanked 
QI 


92 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


by two blue vases. Everything was still, nobody 
at the windows, nobody stirring on the gravel of the 
drive; not a voice, not a whisper, not a footfall. 
And yet, after a long, long look, he turned away al- 
most happy, his heart filled with satisfaction. 

He waited under the old walnut trees of the 
avenue till the windows lighted up one by one in the 
darkness, and then retraced his steps. As he passed 
the railway station, to which people were hurrying 
to catch an incoming train, he saw amid the confu- 
sion a tall woman in a mantilla kiss a young girl 
who was taking her leave. The pale face under 
the mantilla, the long, delicate hands, that seemed 
ungloved out of a voluptuous caprice, how well he 
knew them! How he saw the woman from head to 
foot in a flash! His knees bent under him. He 
felt an exquisite languor, as if he would die there 
and then! No, he never believed she was so beau- 
tiful, so beyond price! And he had thought to for- 
get her! He had imagined he could live without 
her, as if she did not sum up in herself the world 
and life and everything! 

She turned into the lane leading to her house, 
walking at a smart pace, with her dress trailing and 
catching on the brambles, from which with a back- 


JEAN SERVIEN 93 


ward sweep of the hand and a rough pull she would 
twitch it clear. 

Jean followed her, pushing his way deliberately 
through the same bramble bushes and exulting to 
feel the thorns scratch and tear his flesh. 

She stopped at the gate, and Jean saw her pro- 
file, in its purity and dignity, clearly defined in the 
pale moonlight. She was a long time in turning 
the key, and Jean could watch her face, the more 
enthralling to the senses for the absence of any to- 
kens of disturbing intellectual effort. He groaned 
in grief and rage to think how in another second 
the iron bars would be closed between her and him. 

No, he would not have it so; he darted forward, 
seized her by the hand, which he pressed in his own 
and kissed. 

She gave a loud cry of terror, the cry of a fright- 
ened animal. Jean was on his knees on the stone 
step, chafing the hand he held against his teeth, 
forcing the rings into the flesh of his lips. 

A servant, a lady’s maid, came running up, hold- 
ing a candle that had blown out. 

“What is all this?” she asked breathlessly. 

Jean released the hand, which bore the mark of 


his violence in a drop of blood, and got to his feet. 


94 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


Gabrielle, panting and holding the wounded hand 
against her bosom, leant against the gate for 
support. 

‘I want to speak to you; I must,” cried Jean. 

‘‘Here’s pretty manners!”’ shrilled the maid-serv- 
ant. ‘Go your ways,” and she pointed with her 
candlestick first to one end, then to the other of the 
street. 

The actress’s face was still convulsed with the 
shock ‘of her terror. Her lips were trembling and 
drawn back so as to show the teeth glittering. But 
she realized that she had nothing to fear. 

“What do you want with me?” she demanded. 

He had lost his temerity since hc had dropped her 
hand. It was ina very gentle voice he said: 

‘Madame, I beg and beseech you, let me say one 
word to you alone.” 


’ 


“Rosalie,” she ordered, after a moment’s hesi- 


tation, “take a turn or two in the garden. Now 


’ and she remained standing on the step, 


speak, sir,’ 
leaving the gate half-way open, as it had been at 
the moment he had kissed her hand. 
He spoke in all the sincerity of his inmost heart: 
‘All I have to say to you, Madame, is that you 
must not, you ought not, to repulse me, for I love 


you too well to live without you.” 


JEAN SERVIEN 95 


She appeared to be searching in her memory. 

“Was it not you,” she asked, “who sent me some 
verses ?”’ 

He said it was, and she resumed: 

‘'You followed me one evening. It is not right, 
sir, not the right thing, to follow ladies in the 
Street,” 

“I only followed you, and that was because I 
could not help it.” 

‘You are very young.” 

“Yes, but it was long ago I began to love you.” 

“It came upon you all in a moment, did it not?” 

‘Yes, when I saw you.” 

“That is what I thought. You are inflammable, 
so it seems.”’ 

“I do not know, Madame. I love you and I am 
very unhappy. I have lost the heart to live, and I 
cannot bear to die, for then I should not see you any 
more. Let me be near you sometimes. It must be 
so heavenly!” 

“But, sir, I know nothing about you.” 

“That is my misfortune. But how can I be a 
stranger for you? You are no stranger, no 
stranger in my eyes. I do not know any woman, 
for me there is no other woman in the world but 


you.” 


96 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


And again he took her hand, which she let him 
kiss. Then: 

“It is all very pretty,” she said, “but it is not an 
occupation, being in love. What are you? What 
do you do?” 

He answered frankly enough: 

‘‘My father is in trade; he is looking out for a 
post for me.” 

The actress understood the truth; here was a lit- 
tle bourgeois, living contentedly on next to nothing, 
reared in habits of penuriousness, a hidebound, 
mean creature, like the petty tradesmen who used to 
come to her whining for their bills, and whom she 
encountered of a Sunday in smart new coats in the 
Meudon woods. She could feel no interest in him, 
such as he might have inspired, whether as a rich 
man with bouquets and jewels to offer her, or a poor 
wretch so hungry and miserable as to bring tears to 
her eyes. Dazzle her eyes or stir her compassion, 
it must be one or the other! Then she was used 
to young fellows of a more enterprising mettle. 
She thought of a young violinist at the Conserva- 
toire who, one evening, when she was entertaining 
company, had pretended to leave with the rest and 
concealed himself in her dressing-room; as she was 


undressing, thinking herself alone, he burst from 


JEAN SERVIEN 97 


his hiding-place, a bottle of champagne in either 
hand and laughing like a madman. The new lover 
was less diverting. However, she asked him his 
name. 

“Jean Servien.” 

“Well, Monsieur Jean Servien, I am sorry, very 
sorry, to have made you unhappy, as you say you 
ares 

At the bottom of her heart she was more flat- 
tered than grieved at the mischief she had done, 
so she repeated several times over how very sorry 
she was. 

She added: 

“I cannot bear to hurt people. Every time a 
young man is unhappy because of me, I am so dis- 
tressed; but, honour bright, what do you want me 
to do for you? Take yourself off, and be sensible. 
It’s no use your coming back to see me. Besides, 
it would be ridiculous. I have a life of my own to 
live, quite private, and it is out of the question for 
me to receive strange visitors.” 

He assured her between his sobs: 

“Oh! how I wish you were poor and forsaken. 
I would come to you then and we should be happy.” 

She was a good deal surprised he did not take 
her by the waist or think of dragging her into the 


98 JEAN SERVIEN 


garden under the clump of trees where there was a 
bench. She was a trifle disappointed and in a way 
embarrassed not to have to defend her virtue. 
Finding the conclusion of the interview did not 
match the beginning and the young man was getting 
tedious, she slammed the gate in his face and 
slipped back into the garden, where he saw her 
vanish in the darkness. 

She bore on her hand, beside a sapphire on her 
ring finger, a drop of blood. In her chamber, as 
she emptied a jug of water over her hands to wash 
away the stain, she could not help reflecting how 
every drop of blood in this young man’s veins 
would be shed for her whenever she should give 
the word. And the thought made her smile. At 
that moment, if he had been there, in that room, 
at her side, it may be she would not have sent him 
away. 


XV 


WPPRPALELAN hurried down the lane and 


started off across country in such a 





state of high exaltation as robbed 


a him of all sense of realities and ban- 
ished all consciousness whether of 
joy or pain. He had no remembrance of what he 
had been before the moment when he kissed the 
actress’s hand; he seemed a stranger to himself. 
On his lips lingered a taste that stirred voluptuous 
fancies, and grew stronger as he pressed them one 
against the other. 

Next morning his intoxication was dissipated and 
he relapsed into profound depression. He told 
himself that his last chance was gone. He realized 
that the gate overhung with wild vine and ivy was 
shut against him by that careless, capricious hand 
more firmly and more inexorably than ever it could 
have been by the bolts and bars of the most prudish 
virtue. He felt instinctively that his kiss had 
stirred no promptings of desire, that he had been 
powerless to win any hold on his mistress’s senses. 

He had forgotten what he said, but he knew that 
99 


100 ~ tL ASPIRATIONS OF 


he had spoken out in all the frank sincerity of his 
heart. He had exposed his ignorance of the world, 
his contemptible candour. ‘The mischief was irre- 
parable. Could anyone be more unfortunate? He 
had lost even the one advantage he possessed, of 
being unknown to her. 

Though he entertained no very high opinion of 
himself, he certainly held fate responsible for his 
natural deficiencies. He was poor, he reasoned, 
and therefore had no right to fall in love. Ah! if 
only he were wealthy and familiar with all the 
things idle, prosperous people know, how entirely 
the splendour of his material surroundings would 
be in harmony with the splendour of his passion! 
What blundering, ferocious god of cruelty had im- 
mured in the dungeon of poverty this soul of his 
that so overflowed with desires? 

He opened his window and caught sight of his 
father’s apprentice on his way back to the work- 
shop. The lad stood there on the pavement talk- 
ing with naive effrontery to a little book-stitcher of 
his acquaintance. He was kissing the girl, with- 
out a thought of the passers-by, and whistling a 
tune between his teeth. The pretty, sickly-looking 
slattern carried her rags with an air, and wore a 


pair of smart, well-made boots; she was pretend- 


JEAN SERVIEN 101 


ing to push her admirer away, while really doing 
just the opposite, for the slim yet broad-shouldered 
stripling in his blue blouse had a certain townified 
elegance and the ‘“‘conquering hero” air of the sub- 
urban dancing-saloons. When he left her, she 
looked back repeatedly; but he was examining the 
saveloys in a pork-butcher’s window, never giving 
another thought to the girl. 

Jean, as he looked on at the little scene, found 


himself envying his father’s apprentice. 


eee ee 
is 


: - _ 
Pn ee ee 
yy as és a 


| ie ee 
a tan! eens 
: Sn 
ae tS 

, : 





XVI 


Ses5)E read the same morning on the pos- 





4 ters that she was playing that eve- 
ay ning. He watched for her after the 
performance and saw her distribut- 
Name = 21070)7/8 ing hand-shakes to sundry acquaint- 
ances before driving off. He was suddenly struck 
with something hard and cruel in her, which he had 
not observed in the interview of the night before. 
Then he discovered that he hated her, abominated 
her with all the force of his mind and muscles and 
nerves. He longed to tear her to pieces, to rend 
and crush her. It made him furious to think she 
was moving, talking, laughing,—in a word, that she 
was alive. At least it was only fair she should suf- 
fer, that life should wound her and make her heart 
bleed. He was rejoiced at the thought that she 
must die one day, and then nothing of her would 
be left, of her rounded shape and the warmth of 
her flesh; none would ever again see the superb play 
of light in her hair and eyes, the reflections, now 
pale, now pearly, of her dead-white skin. But 
her body, that filled him with such rage, would be 


103 


104 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


young and warm and supple for long years yet, and 
lover after lover would feel it quiver and awake 
to passion. She would exist for other men, but 
not for him. Was that to be borne? Ah! the 
deliciousness of plunging a dagger in that warm, 
living bosom! Ah! the bliss, the voluptuousness 
of holding her pinned beneath one knee and de- 
manding between two stabs: 

“Am I ridiculous now?” 

He was still muttering suchlike maledictions 
when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. Wheel- 
ing round, he saw a quaint figure—a huge nose like 
a pothook, high, massive shoulders, enormous, well- 
shaped hands, a general impression of uncouthness 
combined with vigour and geniality. He thought 
for a moment where this strange monster could 
have come from; then he shouted: ‘‘Garneret!”’ 

Instantly his memory flew back to the courtyard 
and class-rooms of the school in the Rue d’Assas, 
and he saw a heavily built lad, for ever under pun- 
ishment, standing out face to the wall during play- 
time, getting and giving mighty fisticuffs, a terrible 
fellow for plain speaking and hard hitting, indus- 
trious, yet a thorn in the side of masters, always 
in ill-luck, yet ever and anon electrifying the class 


with some stroke of genius. 


JEAN SERVIEN 105 


He was glad enough to see his old schoolfellow 
again, who struck him as looking almost old with 
his puckered lids and heavy features. They set 
off arm in arm along the deserted Quai, and to the 
accompaniment of the faint lapping of the water 
against the retaining walls, told each other the 
history of their past—which was succinct enough, 
their present ideas, and their hopes for the future— 
which were boundless. 

The same ill-luck still pursued Garneret; from 
morn to eve he was engaged on prodigiously labo- 
rious hack-work for a map-maker, who paid him 
the wages of one of his office boys; but his big head 
was crammed with projects. He was working at 
philosophy and getting up before the sun to make 
experiments on the susceptibility to light of the 
invertebrates; by way of studying English and pol- 
Itics at the same time, he was translating Mr. 
Disraeli’s speeches; then every Sunday he accom- 
panied Monsieur Heébert’s pupils on their geological 
excursions in the environs of Paris, while at night 
he gave lectures to working men on Italian painting 
and political economy. There was never a week 
passed but he was bowled over for twenty-four or 
forty-eight hours with an agonizing sick-headache. 
He spent long hours too with his fiancée, a girl with 


106 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


no dowry and no looks, but of a loving, sensitive 
temper, whom he adored and fully intended to 
marry the moment he had five hundred francs to 
call his own. 

Servien could make nothing of the other’s tem- 
perament, one that looks upon the world as an 
immense factory where the good workman labours, 
coat off and sleeves rolled up, the sweat pouring 
from his brow and a song on his lips. He found 
it harder still to conceive a love with which the 
glamour of the stage or the splendours of luxurious 
living had nothing to do. Yet he felt there was 
something strong and sensible and true about it 
all, and craving sympathy he made Garneret the 
confidant of his passion, telling the tale in accents 
of despair and bitterness, though secretly proud to 
be the tortured victim of such fine emotions. 

But Garneret expressed no admiration. 

“My dear fellow,” said he, “you have got all 
these romantic notions out of trashy novels. How 
can you love the woman when you don’t know her ?”’ 

How, indeed? Jean Servien did not know; but 
his nights and days, the throbbings of his heart, the 
thoughts that possessed his mind to the exclusion 
of all else, everything convinced him that it was 
so. He defended himself, talking of mystic influ- 


JEAN SERVIEN 107 


ences, natural affinities, emanations, a divine unity 
of essence. 

Garneret only buried his face between his hands. 
It was above his comprehension. 

‘But come,” he said, ‘‘the woman is no differently 
constituted from other women!” 

Obvious as it was, this consideration filled Jean 
Servien with amazement. It shocked him so much 
that, rather than admit its truth, he racked his 
brains in desperation to find arguments to contro- 
vert the blasphemy. 

Garneret gave his views on women. He had a 
judicial mind, had Garneret, and could account for 
everything in the relations of the sexes; but he 
could not tell Jean why one face glimpsed among 
a thousand gives joy and grief more than life itself 
seemed able to contain. Still, he tried to explain 
the problem, for he was of an eminently ratiocina- 
tive temper. 

“The thing is quite simple,” he declared. 
‘There are a dozen violins for sale at a dealer’s. 
I pass that way, common scraper of catgut that I 
am, I tune them and try them, and play over on 
each of them in turn, with false notes galore, some 
catchy tune—Au clair de la lune or J’ai du bon tabac 
dans ma tabatiere—stuft fit to kill the old cow. 


108 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


Then Paganini comes along; with one sweep of the 
bow he explores the deepest depths of the vibrating 
instruments. ‘The first is flat, the second sharp, the 
third almost dumb, the fourth is hoarse, five others 
have neither power nor truth of tone; but lo! the 
twelfth gives forth under the master’s hand a 
mighty music of sweet, deep-voiced harmonies. It 
is a Stradivarius; Paganini knows it, takes it home 
with him, guards it as the apple of his eye; from 
an instrument that for me would never have been 
more than a resonant wooden box he draws chords 
that make men weep, and love, and fall into a very 
ecstasy; he directs in his will that they bury this 
violin with him in his cofin. Well, Paganini is the 
lover, the instrument with its strings and tuning- 
pegs is the woman. ‘The instrument must be beau- 
tifully made and come from the workshop of a right 
skilful maker; more than that, it must fall into the 
hands of an accomplished player. But, my poor 
lad, granting your actress is a divine instrument of 
amorous music, I don’t believe you capable of draw- 
ing from it one single note of passion’s fugue... . 
Just consider. I don’t spend my nights supping 
with ladies of the theatre; but we all know what 
an actress is. It is an animal generally agreeable 
to see and hear, always badly brought up, spoilt 


JEAN SERVIEN 109 


first by poverty and afterwards by luxury. Very 
busy into the bargain, which makes her as unro- 
mantic as anybody can well be. Something like a 
concierge turned princess, and combining the petty 
spite of the porter’s lodge with the caprices of the 
boudoir and the fagged nerves of the student. 





with 


the munificence and tastefulness of your presents. 


“You can hardly expect to dazzle T 


Your father gives you a hundred sous a week to 
spend; a great deal for a bookbinder, but very little 
for a woman whose gowns cost from five hundred 
to three thousand francs apiece. And, as you are 
neither a Manager to sign agreements, nor a Dra- 
matic Author to apportion roles, nor a Journalist 
to write notices, nor a young man from the draper’s 
to take advantage of a moment’s caprice as oppor- 
tunity offers when delivering a new frock, I don't 
see in the least how you are to make her favour 
you, and I think your tragedy queen did quite right 
to slam her gate in your face.” 

‘Ah, well!” sighed Jean Servien, “I told you just 
now | loved her. Tt is not true. Ichate her! <1 
hate her for all the torments she has made me suf- 
fer, hate her because she is adorable and men love 
her. And I hate all women, because they all love 


someone, and that someone is not I!” 


110 JEAN SERVIEN 


Garneret burst out laughing. 

“Candidly,” he grinned, “they are not so far 
wrong. Your love has no spark of anything affec- 
tionate, kindly, useful in it. Since the day you fell 
in love with Mademoiselle T- 


thought of sparing her pain? Have you once 





, have you once 


dreamed of making a sacrifice for her sake? Has 
any touch of human kindness ever entered into your 
passion? Can it show one mark of manliness or 
goodness? Not it. Well, being the poor devils 
we are, with our own way to push in life and noth- ~ 
ing to help us on, we must be brave and good. It 
is half-past one, and I have to get up at five. 
Good night. Cultivate a quiet mind, and come and 
see me.” 


CV ET 


ey EAN had only three days left to pre- 
pare for his examination for admis- 
sion to the Ministry of Finance. 
These he spent at home, where the 





vat 
NC (3 


PS faces of father, aunt, and apprentice 


seemed strange and unfamiliar, so completely had 
they disappeared from his thoughts. Monsieur 
Servien was displeased with his son, but was too 
timid as well as too tactful to make any overt re- 
proaches. His aunt overwhelmed him with garru- 
lous expressions of doting affection; at night she 
would creep into his room to see if he was sound 
asleep, while all day long she wearied him with the 
tale of her petty grievances and dislikes. 

Once she had caught the apprentice with her 
spectacles, her sacred spectacles, perched on his nose, 
and the profanation had left a kind of religious 
horror in her mind. 

“That boy is capable of anything,” she used to 
say. One of the boy’s pet diversions was to execute 
behind the old lady’s back a war-dance of the Can- 


nibal Islanders he had seen once at a theatre. 


tye 


112 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


Sticking feathers he had plucked from a feather- 
broom in his hair, and holding a big knife without 
a handle between his teeth, he would creep nearer 
and nearer, crouching low and advancing by little 
leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which 
yradually gave place to a look of disappointed ap- 
petite, as a closer scrutiny showed how tough and 
leathery his victim was. Jean could not help laugh- 
ing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as it was. 
His aunt had never got clearly to the bottom of 
the little farce that dogged her heels, but more than 
once, turning her head sharply, she had found rea- 
son to suspect something disrespectful was going 
on. Nevertheless, she put up with the lad because 
of his lowly origin. The only folks she really 
hated were the rich. She was furious because the 
butcher’s wife had gone to a wedding in a silk dress. 

At the upper end of the Rue de Rennes, beside a 
plot of waste land, was a stall where an old woman 
sold dusty ginger-bread and sticks of stale barley- 
sugar. She had a face the colour of brick dust 
under a striped cotton sun-bonnet, and eyes of a 
pale, steely blue. Her whole stock-in-trade had not 
cost a couple of francs, and on windy days the white 
dust from houses building in the neighbourhood 
covered it like a coat of whitewash. Nurses and 


JEAN SERVIEN 113 


mothers would anxiously pull away their little ones 
who were casting sheep’s eyes at the sweetstuff: 

“Dirty!” they would say dissuasively; “dirty!” 

But the woman never seemed to hear; perhaps 
she was past feeling anything. She did not beg. 
Mademoiselle Servien used to bid her good-day 
in passing, address her by name and fall into talk 
with her before the stall, sometimes for a quarter 
of an hour at a time. The staple of conversation 
with them both was the neighbours, accidents that 
had occurred in the public thoroughfares, cases of 
coachmen ill-using their horses, the troubles and 
trials of life and the ways of Providence, ‘‘which 
are not always just.” 

Jean happened to be present at one of these col- 
loquies. He was a plebeian himself, and this 
glimpse of the petty lives of the poor, this peep 
into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless 
resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In 
an instant, as he stood between the two old crones, 
with their drab faces and no outlook on life save 
that of the streets, now gloomy and empty, now 
full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man 
learned more of human conditions than he had ever 
been taught at school. His thoughts flew from this 


woman to that other, who was so beautiful and 


114 JEAN SERVIEN 


whom he loved, and he saw life before him as a 
whole—a melancholy panorama. He told himself 
they must die both of them, and a hideous old 
woman, squatted before a few sodden sweetmeats, 
gave him the same impression of solemn serenity 
he had experienced at sight of the jewels from the 
Queen of Egypt’s sepulchre. 


XVIII 







Py Wa SET ne all ae over Urileseroe: 
Fad Let, lems in arithmetic, he set off in the 


2. {oP os evening in working clothes for the 





Avenue de l’Observatoire. ‘There, 
™s between two tallow candles, in front 
of a hoarding covered with ballads in illustrated 
covers, a fellow was singing in a cracked voice to 
the accompaniment of a guitar. A number of 
workmen and work-girls stood round listening to 
the music. Jean slipped into the circle, urged by 
the instinct that draws a stroller with nothing to do 
to the neighbourhood of light and noise and that 
love of a crowd which is charateristic of your Pa- 
risian. More isolated in the press, more alone than 
ever, he stood dreaming of the splendour and pas- 
sion of some noble tragedy of Euripides or Shake- 
speare. It was some time before he noticed some- 
thing soft touching and pressing against him from 
behind. He turned round and saw a work-girl in 
a little black hat with blue ribbons. She was young 
and pretty enough, but his mind was fixed on the 
awe-inspiring and superhuman graces of an Electra 
115 


116 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


or a Lady Macbeth. She went on nuzzling against 
his back till he looked round again. 
she said then; “will you just let me 


‘*Monsieur,”’ 


slip in front of you? I am so little; I shan’t stop 
your seeing.” , 

She had a nice voice. The poise of her head, 
lifted and thrown back on a plump neck, showed a 
pair of bright eyes and good teeth between pouting 
lips. She glided, merry and alert, into the place 
Jean made for her without a word. 

The man with the guitar sang a ballad about 
caged birds and blossoms in flower-pots. 

“Mine,’ observed the work-girl to Jean, ‘‘are 
carnations, and I have birds too—canaries they 
are.’ 

At the moment he was thinking of some fair- 
faced chatelaine roaming under the battlements of 
a donjon. 

The work-girl went on: 

‘“T have a pair,—you understand, to keep each 
other company. ‘Two is a nice number, don’t you 
think so?” 

He marched off with his visions under the old 
trees of the Avenue. After a turn or two up and 
down, he espied the little work-girl hanging on 


the arm of a handsome young fellow, fashionably 


JEAN SERVIEN 117 


dressed, wearing a heavy gold watch-chain. Her 
admirer was catching her by the waist in the dusk 
of the trees, and she was laughing. 

Then Jean Servien felt sorry he had scorned her 
advances. 


XIX 


TOR) EAN was called up for examination, 
but with his insufficient preparation 
he got hopelessly fogged in the in- 
tricacies of a difficult, tricky piece 





of dictation and sums that were too 
long to be worked in the time allowed the candi- 
dates. He came home in despair. His father 
tried in his good-nature to reassure him. But a 
fortnight after came an unstamped letter summon- 
ing him to the Ministry, and after a three hours’ 
wait he was shown into Monsieur Bargemont’s pri- 
vate room. He recognized his own dictation in the 
big man’s hand. 

“I am sorry,” the functionary began, “‘to inform 
you that you have entirely failed to pass the tests 
set you. You do not know the language of your 
own country, sir; you write Maisons-Lafitte without 
an ‘s’ to Maisons. You cannot spell! and what is 
more, you do not cross your ‘t’s.” You must know 
at your age that a ‘t’ ought to be crossed. 
It’s past understanding, sir!” 

And striking fiercely at the sheet of foolscap on 
I19Q 


120 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


which the mistakes were marked in red ink, he kept 
muttering: “It’s past understanding, past under- 
standing!” His face grew purple, and a swollen 
vein stood out on his forehead. A queer look in 
Jean’s face gave him pause: 

‘Young man,” he resumed in a calmer voice, 
“whatever I can do for you, I will do, be sure of 
that; but you must not ask me to do impossibilities. 
We cannot enlist in the service of the State young 
men who spell so badly they write Maisons-Lafitte 
without an ‘s’ to the Maisons. It is in a way a 
patriotic duty for a Frenchman to know his own 
language. A year hence, the Ministry will hold 
another examination, and I will enter your name. 
You have a year before you; work hard, sir, and 
learn your mother-tongue.”’ 

Jean stood there scarlet with rage, hate in his 
heart, his eyes aflame, his throat dry, his teeth 
clenched, unable to articulate a word; then he 
swung round like an automaton and darted from 
the room, banging the door after him with a noise 
of thunder; piles of books and papers rolled on to 
the floor of the Chief’s office at the shock. 

Monsieur Bargemont was left alone to digest his 


stupefaction; even so his first thought was to save 


JEAN SERVIEN E23 


the honour of his Department. He reopened the 
door and shouted, ‘“‘Leave the room!” after Jean, 
who, mastered once more by his natural timidity, 
was flying like a thief down the corridors. 





XX 


N the court, which was enlivened by a 
parterre of roses, Jean, carrying a 
letter in his hand, was trying to find 


his bearings according to the direc- 





tions given him in a low voice, as if 
it were a secret, by the lay-brother who acted as 
doorkeeper. He was wandering uncertainly from 
door to door along the walls of the old silent build- 
ings when a little boy noticed his plight and accosted 
him: 

“Do you want to see the Director? He is in 
his study with mamma. Go and wait in the 
parlour.” 

This was a large hall with bare walls, a noble 
enough apartment in its unadorned simplicity, in 
spite of the mean horsehair chairs that stood round 
it. Above the fire-place, instead of a mirror, was 
a Mater dolorosa that caught the eye by its daz- 
zling whiteness. Big marble tears stood arrested 
in mid-career down the cheeks, while the features 
expressed the pious absorption of the Divine 


123 


124 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


Mother’s grief. Jean Servien read the inscription 
cut in red letters on the pedestal, which ran thus: 


PRESENTED TO THE REVEREND ABBE BORDIER, 
IN MEMORY OF 


PHILIPPE-GUY DE THIERERCHE, 
WHO DIED AT PAU, 
NOVEMBER II, 1867, IN THE SEVENTEENTH 
YEAR OF HIS AGE, 
BY THE COUNTESS VALENTINE DE THIERERCHE, 
NEE DE BRUILLE DE SAINT-AMAND. 
LAUDATE PUERI DOMINUM 


Then he forgot his anxieties, forgot he was there 
to beg for employment, shook off the instinctive 
dread that had seized him on the threshold of the 
great silent house. He forgot his fears and hopes 
—hopes of being promoted usher! He was ab- 
sorbed by this cruel domestic drama revealed to 
him in the inscription. A scion of one of the great- 
est families of France, a pupil of the Abbé Bordier, 
attacked by phthisis in the midst of his now profit- 
less studies and leaving school, not to enjoy life and 
taste the glorious pleasures only those contemn who 
have drained them to the dregs, but to die at a 
southern town in the arms of his mother whose 
overwhelming, but still self-conscious grief was sym- 


bolized by this pompous memorial of her sorrow. 


JEAN SERVIEN 125 
He could feel, he could see it all. The three Latin 


words that represent the stricken mother saying: 
“Children, praise ye the Lord who hath taken away 
my child,’ astonished him by their austere piety, 
while at the same time he admired the aristocratic 
bearing that was preserved even in the presence of 
death. 

He was still lost in these day-dreams when an old 
priest beckoned him to walk into an inner room. 
The worthy man took the letter of recommendation 
which Jean handed him, set on his big nose a pair 
of spectacles with round glasses for all the world 
like the two wheels of a miniature silver chariot, 
and proceeded to read the letter, holding it out at 
the full stretch of his arm. The windows giving 
on the garden stood open, and a tendril of wild 
vine hung down on to the desk at the foot of a 
crucifix of old ivory, while a light breeze set the 
papers on it fluttering like white wings. 

The Abbé Bordier, his reading concluded, turned 
to the young man, showing a deeply lined counte- 
nance and a forehead beautifully polished by age. 
He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. 
Then the worn eyelids lifted slowly and discovered 
a pair of grey eyes of a shade that somehow re- 


minded you of an autumn morning. He lay back 


126 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


in his armchair, his legs stretched out in front of 
him, displaying his silver-buckled shoes and black 
stockings. 

“It seems then, my dear boy,” he began, “‘you 
wish, so my venerable friend the Abbé Marguerite 
informs me, to devote yourself to teaching; and 
your idea would be to prepare for your degree while 
at the same time performing the duties of an as- 
sistant master to supervise the boys at their work. 
It is a humble office; but it will depend entirely on 
yourself, my dear young friend, to dignify it by a 
heartfelt zeal and a determination to succeed. I 
shall entrust the studies of the Remove to your care. 
Our bursar will inform you of the conditions at- 
taching to the post.” 

Jean bowed and made to leave the room; but 
suddenly the Abbé Bordier beckoned him to stop 
and asked abruptly: 

‘You understand the rules of verse?” 

“Latin verse?” queried Jean. 

“No, no! French verse. Now, would you 
rhyme frome with couronne? The rhyme is not, it 
must be allowed, quite satisfactory to the ear, yet 
the usage of the great writers authorizes it.” 

So saying, the old fellow laid hold of a bulky 
manuscript book. 


JEAN SERVIEN 127 


“Listen,” he cried, “listen. It is St. Fabricius 
addressing the Proconsul Flavius: 


Acheve, fais dresser lappareil souhaité 

De ma mort, ou plutot de ma feélicité. 

Le Roi des Rois, du haut de son céleste trone, 
Déja me tend la palme et tresse ma couronne. 


‘Do you think it would be better if he said: 


Acheve, fais dresser l'appareil souhaité 

De ma mort, ou plutot de ma feélicite. 

Je vois le Roi des Rois me tendre la couronne, 

Quel n’en est pas le prix quand c'est Dieu qui la donne! 


‘Doubtless these latter lines are more correct 
than the others, but they are less vigorous, and a 


poet should never sacrifice meaning to metre. 


Le Roi des Rois, du haut de son céleste tréne, 
Déja me tend la palme et tresse ma couronne.” 


This time, as he declaimed the verses, he went 
through the corresponding gestures of tendering a 
gift and plaiting a garland. 

“It is better so,’ he added, ‘‘better so!”’ 

Jean, in some surprise, said yes, it was certainly 
better. 


b) 


‘Certainly better, yes,” cried the old poet, smil- 
ing with the happy innocence of a little child. 


Then he confided in Jean that it was a very dif- 


128 THE ASPIRATIONS: OF 


ficult thing indeed to write poetry. You must get 
the cesura in the right place, bring in the rhyme 
naturally, make your rhythm run in divers cadences, 
now strong, now sweet, sometimes onomatopoetic, 
use only words either elevated in themselves or dig- 
nified by the circumstances. 

He read one passage of his Tragedy because he 
had his doubts about the number of feet in the 
line, another because he thought it contained some 
bold strokes happily conceived, then a third to elu- 
cidate the two first, eventually the whole five acts 
from start to finish. He acted the words as he 
read, modulating his voice to suit the various char- 
acters, stamping and storming, and to adjust his 
black skull-cap—it would tumble off at the pathetic 
parts—dealing himself a succession of sounding 
slaps on the crown of his head. 

This sacred drama, in which no woman appeared, 
was to be played by the pupils of the Institution at 
a forthcoming function. The previous year he had 
staged his first tragedy, le Baptéme de Clovis, in 
the same approved style. A regular, Monsieur 
Schuver, had arranged garlands of paper roses to 
represent the battlefield of Tolbiac and the basilica 
at Rheims. ‘To give a wild, barbaric look to the 
boys who represented Clovis’ henchmen, the sister 


JEAN SERVIEN 129 


superintendent of the wardrobe had tacked up their 
white trousers to the knee. But the Abbé Bordier 
hoped greater things still for his new piece. 

Jean applauded and improved upon these ambi- 
tious projects. His suggestions for scenery and 
costumes were admirable. He would have the 
ruthless Flavius seated on a curule chair of ivory, 
draped with purple, erected before a portico 
painted on the back cloth. The costumes of the 
Roman soldiers, he insisted, must be copied from 
those on Trajan’s Column. 

His words opened superb vistas before the old 
priest’s eyes; he was enchanted, ravished, yet full 
of doubts and fears. Alas! Monsieur Schuver was 
quite helpless if it came to designing anything 
more ambitious than his paper roses. Then Jean 
must needs take a look round in the shed where the 
properties were stored, and the two discussed to- 
gether how the stage must be set and the side-scenes 
worked. Jean took measurements, drew up a plan, 
worked out an estimate. He manifested a passion- 
ate eagerness that was surprising, albeit the old 
priest took it all as a matter of course. A batten 
would come here, a practicable door there. The 
actor would enter there . . 

But the worthy priest checked him: 


130 JEAN SERVIEN 


“Say the reciter, my dear boy; actor is not a word 
for self-respecting people.” 

Barring this trifling misunderstanding, they were 
in perfect accord. The sun was setting by this 
time and the Abbé Bordier’s shadow, grotesquely 
elongated, danced up and down the sandy floor 
of the shed, while the old, broken voice declaimed 
tags of verse that echoed to the furthest recesses 
of the court. But Jean Servien was smiling at the 
vision only his eyes could see of Gabrielle, the in- 


spirer of all his enthusiasm. 


XXI 


T was nearly the end of the long 
evening preparation and absolute 
quiet reigned in the schoolroom. 
The broad lamp-shades_ concen- 
trated the light on the tangled 





heads of the boys, who were working at their 
lessons or sitting in a brown study with their noses 
on the desks. The only sounds were the crackling 
of paper, the lads’ breathing and the scratch, 
scratch of steel pens. The youngest there, his 
cheeks still browned by the seabreezes, was dream- 
ing over his half-finished exercise of a beach on the 
Normandy coast and the sand-castles he and his 
friends used to build, to see them swept away 
presently by the waves of the rising tide. 

At the top of the great room, at the high desk 
where the Superintendent of Studies had solemnly 
installed him underneath the great ebony crucifix, 
Jean Servien, his head between his two hands, was 
reading a Latin poet. 

He felt utterly sad and lonely; but he had not 
realized yet that his new life was actual fact, and 


I31 


132 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


from moment to moment he expected the school- 
room would suddenly vanish and the desks with 
their litter of dictionaries and grammars and the 
young heads gilded by the lamp-light melt into thin 
air. 

Suddenly a paper pellet, shot from the far end 
of the hall, struck him on the cheek. He turned 
pale and cried in a voice shaking with anger: 

“Monsieur de Grizolles, leave the room!” 

There was some whispering and stifled laughter, 
then peace was restored. The scratching of pens 
began again, and exercises were passed surrepti- 
tiously from hand to hand for cribbing purposes. 

He was an usher. 

His father had come to this decision by the ad- 
vice of Monsieur Marguerite, the vicaire of his 
parish and a friend of the Abbé Bordier. The 
bookbinder, having a high respect for knowledge, 
entertained a correspondingly high idea of the 
status of all its ministers. Assistant master struck 
him as an imposing title, and he was delighted to 
have his son connected with an aristocratic and 
religious foundation. 

“Your son,” the Abbé Marguerite told him, “will 
read for his Master’s degree in the intervals of his 


duties, and the title of Licencié-es-Lettres will open 


JEAN SERVIEN 133 


the door to the higher walks of teaching. We 
have known assistants rise to high positions in the 
University and even occupy Monsieur de Fontanes’ 
chair.”’ 

These considerations had clenched the book- 
binder’s resolution, and this was now the third day 
of Jean’s ushership. 


yooh a ca 
“ a 


ae. 
can 
ae 
ye. 





XXII 


PamealtiREE months had dragged by. It 
was a Friday; a hot, nauseating smell 
of fried fish filled the refectory; a 
strong draught blew cold about feet 





encased in wet boots; the walls 
dripped with moisture, and outside the barred win- 
dows a fine rain was falling from a grey sky. The 
boys, seated at marble-topped tables, were making 
a hideous rattle with their forks and tin cups, while 
one of their schoolfellows, seated at the desk in 
the middle of the great room, was reading aloud, 
as the regulations direct, a passage from Rollin’s 
Ancient History. 

Jean, at the head of a table, his nose in his ill- 
washed earthernware plate, had cold feet and a sore 
heart. Something resembling rotten wood formed 
a deposit at the bottom of his glass, while the 
servers were handing round dishes of prunes with 
their thumbs washing in the juice. Now and again, 
amid the rattle of plates, the rasping voice of the 
reader, a lad of seventeen, reached the usher’s ears. 
He caught the name of Cleopatra and some scraps 


135 


136 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


of sentences: “She was about to appear before 
Antony at an age when women unite with the 
flower of their beauty every charm of wit and 
intellect... her person more compelling than 
any magnificence of adornment. ... Her galley 
entered the Cydnus ... the poop of the vessel 
shone resplendent with gold, the sails were of 
Tyrian purple, the oars of silver.” 

Then the seductive names of Nereids, flutes, 
perfumes. The hot blood flooded his cheeks. 
The woman who for him was the sole and only in- 
carnation of the whole race of womankind through- 
out the ages rose before his mental sight with a 
surprising clearness; every hair of his body stood 
on end in an agonizing spasm of desire, and he 
dug his nails into the palms of his hands. The 
vision caused him an unspeakable yet delicious 
pain—Gabrielle in a loose peignoir at a small, 
daintily ordered table gay with flowers ard glasses. 
He saw it all quite clearly; his gaze searched 
every fold of the soft material that covered her 
bosom and rose and fell at each breath she drew. 
Face and neck and lively hands had a surprisingly 
brilliant yet so natural a sheen that they exhaled 
amorous invitation as if they had been verily of 
flesh and blood. The superb moulding of the lips, 


JEAN SERVIEN 137 


pouting like a ripe mulberry, and the exquisite 
grain of the skin were manifest—treasures such as 
men risk death and crime to win. It was the ac- 
tress, in fine, seen by the two eyes which of all eyes 
in the whole world had learned to see her best. 
She was not alone; a man was looking at her with 
a penetrating intensity as he filled her glass. They 
were straining one towards the other. Jean could 
not restrain his sobs. Suddenly he seemed to be 
falling from the top of a high tower. The Super- 
intendent of Studies was standing in front of him 
and saying: 

‘Monsieur Servien, will you see about punishing 
that boy Laboriette, who is emptying his leavings 
in his neighbour’s pocket? 





XXIII 


9 HE Superintendent, with his large, 
flat face and the sly ways of a 
peasant turned monk, was a con- 


stant thorn in Jean’s side. “Be 
” 





firm, be firm, sir,” was his parable 
every day, and he never missed an opportunity 
of doing the usher an ill turn with the Director. 

The early days of Jean’s servitude had slipped 
by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet 
ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he 
was popular with the more sensible boys, while the 
others left him in peace, as he did them. But 
there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a hand- 
some young savage, proud of his aristocratic name, 
which he scribbled in big letters on his light trousers, 
and overjoyed at the chance of hurting an inferior’s 
feelings, had from the very first day declared war 
against the poor usher. He used to empty ink- 
bottles into his desk, stick cobbler’s wax on his 
chair, and let off crackers in the middle of school. 

Hearing the disturbance, the Superintendent 
139 


140 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


would march in with the airs of a Police Inspector 
and bid Jean: “Be firm, sir! be firm!” 

Far from taking his advice, Jean affected an 
excessive easiness of temper. One day he caught 
a boy in the act of drawing a caricature of himself; 
he picked it up and glanced at it, then handed it 
back to the artist with a shrug of the shoulders. 

Such mildness was misconstrued and only weak- 
ened his authority. The usher’s miseries grew 
acute, and he lost the patience that alleviated his 
sufferings. He could not put up with the lads’ rest- 
lessness, their happy laughter and light-hearted 
enjoyment of life. He showed temper, venting his 
spite on mere acts of thuughtlessness or simple 
ebullitions of high spirits. Then he would fall into 
asort of torpor. He had long fits of absentminded- 
ness, during which he was deaf to every noise. It 
became the fashion to keep birds, plait nets, shoot 
arrows, and crow like a cock in Monsieur Jean Ser- 
vien’s class-rroom. Even the boys from other divi- 
sions would slip out of their own class-rooms to 
peep in at the windows of this one, about which 
such amazing stories were told, and the ceiling of 
which was decorated with little figures swinging at 
the end of a string stuck to the plaster with chewed 


paper. 


JEAN SERVIEN 141 


De Grizolles had installed a regular Roman cata- 
pult for shooting kidney-beans at the usher’s head. 

Jean would drive the young gentleman out of 
the room. The Superintendent of Studies would 
reinstate him, only to be turned out again. And 
each time meant a fresh report to the Director. 
The Abbé Bordier, who never found patience to hear 
the worthy Superintendent out to the end, could only 
throw up his hands to heaven and declare they 
would be the death of him between them. But the 
impression became fixed in his mind that the As- 
sistant in charge of the Remove was a source of 


trouble. 


<* 


0) 
= 7 





XXIV 







Fz UNDAY was a day of cheerful in- 
a OX. a dolence, devoted to attending the 
Wty i y a services in the Chapel, which was 
Ne yp) I filled with the scent of incense all day 
long. At Vespers, while the clear, 
boyish voices intoned the long-drawn canticles, Jean 
would be gazing at some woman’s face half seen in 
the dusk of the galleries where the pupils’ mothers 
and sisters knelt during the office, their haughty air 
contradicting the humble attitude. At the sound of 
the Ave maris stella, the lowly bookbinder’s son 
would lift his eyes to these ladies of high degree, 
the plainest of whom feels herself a jewel of price 
and cherishes a natural and unaffected pride of 
birth. The chants and incense, the flowers and 
sacred images, whatever troubles the imagination 
and stimulates to prayer, all these things united to 
enervate his spirit and deliver him a trembling 
victim to the glamour of these patrician dames. 
But it was Gabrielle he worshipped in them, 
Gabrielle to whom he offered up his prayers, his 
143 


144 JEAN SERVIEN 


supplications. All that element in religion which 
gives to love the fascination of forbidden fruit 
appealed powerfully to his imagination. Unbe- 
liever though he was, he loved the Magdalen’s God 
and savoured the creed that has bestowed on lovers 
one amorous bliss the more—the bliss of losing 


their immortal souls. 


XXV 


ITTLE by little the boys wearied 
4 of this insubordination, their im- 
aginations proving unequal to the 
/h\ invention of any new forms of mis- 
chief. Even de Grizolles himself 
left off shooting beans. Instead, he conceived the 





notion of brewing chocolate inside his desk with a 
spirit-lamp and a silver patty-pan. Jean left him in 
peace and reopened his Sophocles with a sigh of 
relief. But the Superintendent, going by in the 
court, caught a smell of cooking, searched the desks 
and unearthed the patty-pan, which he offered, still 
warm, for the Reverend the Director’s inspection, 
with the words: ‘“There! that’s what goes on 
in Monsieur Servien’s class-room.” The Director 
slapped his forehead, declared they would be the 
death of him and ordered the patty-pan to be re- 
stored to its owner. Then he sent for the Assistant 
in charge and administered a severe reprimand, be- 
cause he believed it to be his bounden duty to do so. 

The next day was a whole holiday, and Jean went 
to spend the day at his father’s. The latter asked 

145 


146 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


him if he was ready for his professorial exami- 
nation. 

‘My lad,” he adjured him, “‘be quick and find a 
good post if you want me to see you init. One of 
these days your aunt and I will be going out at 
yonder door feet foremost. The old lady had a fit 
of dizziness last week on the stairs. J am not ill, 
but I can feel I am worn out. I have done a hard 
life’s work in the world.” 

He looked at his tools, and walked away, a bent 
old man! 

Then Jean gathered up in both hands the old 
work-worn tools, all polished with use, scissors, 
punches, knives, folders, scrapers, and kissed them, 
the tears running down his cheeks. 

At that moment his aunt came in, looking for her 
spectacles. Furtively, in a whisper, she asked him 
for a little monev. In the old days she used to save 
the halfpence to slip them into the “‘little lad’s” 
hand; now, grown feebler than the child, she trem- 
bled at the idea of destitution; she hoarded, and 
asked charity of the priests. The fact is, her wits 
were weakening. Very often she would inform her 
brother that she did not mean to let the week pass 
without going to see the Brideaus. Now the 
Brideaus, jobbing tailors at Montrouge in their life- 


JEAN SERVIEN 147 


time, had been dead, both husband and wife, for 
the last two years. Jean gave her a louis, which 
she took with a delight so ugly to see that the 
poor lad took refuge out of doors. 

Presently, without quite knowing how, he found 
himself on the Quai near the Pont d’Iéna. It was 
a bright day but the gloomy walls of the houses and 
the grey look of the river banks seemed to proclaim 
that life is hard and cruel. Out in the stream a 
drecger, all drab with marl, was discharging one 
after the other its bucketfuls of miry gravel. By 
the waterside a stout oaken crane was unloading mill- 
stones, wheeling backwards and forwards on its axis. 
Under the parapet, near the bridge, an old dame 
with a copper-red face sat knitting stockings as she 
waited for customers to buy her apple-puffs. 

Jean Servien thought of his childhood; many a 
time had his aunt taken him to the same spot, many 
a time had they watched together the dredger haul- 
ing aboard, bucketful by bucketful, the muddy dregs 
of the river. Very often his aunt had stopped to 
exchange ideas with the old stallkeeper, while he 
examined the counter which was spread with a 
napkin, the carafe of liquorice-water that stood on 
it, and the lemon that served as stopper. Nothing 
was changed, neither the dredger, nor the rafts of 


148 JEAN SERVIEN 


timber, nor the old woman, nor the four ponderous 
stallions at either end of the Pont d’léna. 

Yes, Jean Servien could hear the trees along the 
Quai, the waters of the river, the very stones of the 
parapet calling to him: 

“We know you; you are the little boy his aunt, 
in a peasant’s cap, used to bring here to see us in 
former days. But we shall never see your aunt 
again, nor her print shawl, nor her umbrella which 
she opened against the sun; for she is old now and 
does not take her nephew walks any more, for he is 
a grown man now. Yes, the child is grown into a 
man and has been hurt by life, while he was run- 
ning after shadows.” 


CHAPTER: 3 XVI 


J NE day, in the midday interval, he 
was informed that a visitor was 
asking for him in the parlour; the 
J news filled him with delight, for he 
was very young and still counted on 
the possibilities of the unknown. In the parlour 
he found Monsieur Tudesco, wearing his waistcoat 





of ticking and holding a peaked hat in one hand. 
“My young friend,’ began the Italian, “I 
learned from your respected father’s apprentice 
that you were confined in this sanctuary of studious 
learning. I venture to say your fortune is overcast 
with clouds, at least I fear it is. The lowliness of 
your estate is not gilded like that of the Latin poet, 
and you are struggling with a valiant heart against 
adverse fortune. That is why I am come to offer 
you the hand of friendship, and I venture to say 
you will regard as a mark of my amity and my 
esteem the request I proffer for a crown-piece, 
which I find needful to sustain an existence conse- 
crated to learned studies.” 
The parlour was filling with pupils and their 
149 


150 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


friends and relations. Mothers and sons were ex- 
changing sounding kisses, followed by exclamations 
of “How hot you are, dear!” and prolonged whis- 
perings. Girls in light summer frocks were making 
sheep’s eyes on the sly at their brothers’ friends, 
while fathers were pulling cakes of chocolate out 
of their pockets. 

Monsieur Tudesco, entirely at his ease among 
these fine people, did not seem at all aware of the 
young usher’s hideous embarrassment. To the 
latter's, ‘‘Come outside; we can talk better there,” 
the old man replied unconcernedly, ‘‘Oh, no, I 
don’t think so.” 

He welcomed each lady who came in with a 
profound bow, and distributed friendly taps on the 
cheek among the young aristocrats around him. 

Lying back in an arm-chair and displaying his 
famous waistcoat to the very best advantage, he 
enlarged on such episodes of his life as he thought 
most impressive: 

“The fates were vanquished,” he was telling 
Servien, “my livelihood was assured. The land- 
lord of an inn had entrusted his books to me, and 
under his roof I was devoting my attention to 
mathematical calculations, not, like the illustrious 
and ill-starred Galileo, to measure the stars, but 


JEAN SERVIEN 151 


to establish with exactitude the profits and losses 
of atrader. After two days’ performance of these 
honourable duties, the Commissary of Police made 
a descent upon the inn, arrested the landlord and 
the landlady and carried away my account books 
with him. No, I had not vanquished the fates!” 

Every head was turned, every eye directed in 
amazement towards this extraordinary personage. 
There was much whispering and some half-sup- 
pressed laughter. Jean, seeing himself the centre 
of mocking glances and looks of annoyance, drew 
Tudesco towards the door. But just as the Marquis 
was making a series of sweeping bows by way of 
farewell to the ladies, Jean found himself face to 
face with the Superintendent of Studies, who said 
to him: 

“Oh! Monsieur Servien, will you go and take 
detention in Monsieur Schuver’s absence?” 

The Marquis pressed his young friend’s hand, 
watched him depart to his duties, and then, turning 
back to the groups gathered in the parlour, he 
waved his hand with a gesture at once dignified and 
appealing to call for silence. 

‘Ladies and gentlemen,”’ he began, “‘I have trans- 
lated into the French tongue, which Brunetto 
Latini declared to be the most delectable of all, the 


Hee THE, ASPIRATIONS. OF 


Gerusalemme Liberata, the glorious masterpiece of 
the divine Torquato Tasso. This great work I 
wrote in a garret without fire, on candle wrappers, 


on snuff papers 





At this point, from one corner of the parlour, a 
crow of childish laughter went off like a rocket. 

Monsieur Tudesco stopped short and smiled, his 
hair flying, his eye moist, his arms thrown open as 
if to embrace and bless; then he resumed: 

“T say it: the laugh of innocence is the ill-starred 
veteran’s joy. I see from where I stand groups 
worthy of Correggio’s brush, and I say: Happy 
the families that meet together in peace in the heart 
of their fatherland! Ladies and gentlemen, pardon 
me if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius. I 
am an old tree riven by the levin-bolt.” 

And he went from group to group holding out his 
peaked felt hat, into which, amid an icy silence, fell 
coin by coin a dribble of small silver. 

But suddenly the Superintendent of Studies seized 
the hat and pushed the old man outside. 

“Give me back my hat,” bawled Monsieur 
Tudesco to the Superintendent, who was doing his 
best to restore the coins to the donors; “give back 
the old man’s hat, the hat of one who has grown 


grey in learned studies.” 


JEAN SERVIEN 153 


The Superintendent, scarlet with rage, tossed the 
felt into the court, shouting: 

“Be off, or I will call the police.” 

The Marquis Tudesco took to his heels with great 
agility. 

The same evening the new Assistant was sum- 
moned to the Director’s presence and received his 
dismissal. 

“Unhappy boy! unhappy boy!” said the Abbé 
Bordier, beating his brow; “‘you have been the cause 
of an intolerable scandal, of a sort unheard of in 
this house, and that just when I had so much to 
do.” 

And as he spoke, the scattered papers fluttered 
like white birds on the Director’s table. 

Making his way through the parlour, Jean saw 
the Mater dolorosa as before, and read again the 
names of Philippe-Guy Thiererche and the Countess 
Valentine. 

“IT hate them,’ he muttered through clenched 
teeth, “I hate them all.” 

Meantime, the good priest felt a stir of pity. 
Every day they had badgered him with reports 
against Jean Servien. This time he had given way; 
he had sacrificed the young usher; but he really 
could make nothing of this tale about a beggar. 


154 JEAN SERVIEN 


He changed his mind, ran to the door and called 
to the young man to come back. 

Jean turned and faced him: 

“No! he cried, “no! I can bear the life no 
longer; I am unhappy, I am full of misery—and 
hate.” 

‘Poor lad!” sighed the Director letting his arms 
drop by his side. 

That evening he did not write a single line of 
his Tragedy. 


XXVII 
HE kind-hearted bookbinder har- 


assed his son with no reproaches. 

After dinner he went and sat at 
his shop-door, and looked at the 
first star that peepedout in: the 





evening sky. 

“My boy, said he, “I am not a man of learning 
like you; but I have the notion—and you must not 
rob me of it, because it is a comfort to me—that, 
when I have finished binding books, I shall go to 
that star. The idea occurred to me from what I 
have read in the paper that the stars are all worlds. 
What is that star called?” 

“Venus, father.” 

“In my part of the world, they say it is the 
shepherd’s star. It’s a beautiful star, and I think 
your mother is there. That is why I should like 
to go there.” 

The old man passed his knotted fingers across 
his brow, murmuring: 

“God forgive me, how one forgets those who 


are gone!” 
155 


156 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


Jean sought balm for his wounded spirit in read- 
ing poetry and in long, dreamy walks. His head 
was filled with visions—a welter of sublime imag- 
inings, in which floated such figures as Ophelia 
and Cassandra, Gretchen, Delia, Phedra, Manon 
Lescaut, and Virginia, and hovering amid these, 
shadows still nameless, still almost formless, and 
yet full of seduction! Holding bowls and daggers 
and trailing long veils, they came and went, faded 
and grew vivid with colour. And Jean could hear 
them calling to him: “If ever we win to life, it will 
be through you. And what a bliss it will be for 
you, Jean Servien, to have created us. How you 
will love us!’? And Jean Servien would answer 
them: ‘‘Come back, come back, or rather do not 
leave me. But I cannot tell how to make you 
visible; you vanish away when I gaze at you, and 
I cannot net you in the meshes of beautiful verse!” 

Again and again he tried to write poems, trage- 
dies, romances; but his indolence, his lack of ideas, 
his fastidiousness brought him to a standstill before 
half a dozen lines were written, and he would toss 
the all but virgin page into the fire. Quickly dis- 
couraged, he turned his attention to politics. The 
funeral of Victor Noir, the Belleville risings, the 
plébiscite, filled his thoughts; he read the papers, 


JEAN SERVIEN 157 


joined the groups that gathered on the boulevards, 
followed the yelping pack of white blouses, and was 
one of the crowd that hooted the Commissary of 
Police as he read the Riot Act. Disorder and 
uproar intoxicated him; his heart beat as if it would 
burst his bosom, his enthusiasm rose to fever pitch, 
amid these stupid exhibitions of mob violence. 
Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other 
gaping idlers till late at night, he would make his 
way back, with weary limbs and aching ribs, his 
head whirling confusedly with bombast and loud 
talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg 
Saint-Germain. There, as he strode past some 
aristocratic mansion and saw the scutcheon_ bla- 
zoned on its facade and the two lions lying white 
in the moonlight on guard before its closed portal, 
he would cast a look of hatred at the building. 
Presently, as he resumed his march, he would picture 
himself standing, musket in hand, on a barricade, in 
the smoke of insurrection, along with workmen and 
young fellows from the schools, as we see it all 
represented in lithographs. 

One day in July, he saw a troop of white blouses 
moving along the boulevard and shouting: “To 
Berlin!” Ragamuffin street-boys ran yelping round. 
Respectable citizens lined the sidewalks, staring in 


158 JEAN SERVIEN 
wonder, and saying nothing; but one of them, a 


stout, tall, red-faced man, waved his hat and 


shouted : 
“To Berlin! Long live the Emperor!” 


Jean recognized Monsieur Bargemont. 


XXVIII 


| N the top of the ramparts. Bivouac 
huts and stacked rifles guarded by a 
sentinel. National Guards are play- 
ing shove ha’penny. The autumn 





sunshine lies clear and soft and 
splendid on the roofs of the beleagured city. Out- 
side the fortifications, the bare, grey fields; in the 
distance the barracks of the outlying forts, over 
which fleecy puffs of smoke sail upwards; on the 
horizon the hills whence the Prussian batteries are 
firing on Paris, leaving long trails of white smoke. 
The guns thunder. ‘They have been thundering for 
a month, and no one so much as hears them now. 
Servien and Garneret, wearing the red-piped képi 
and the tunic with brass buttons, are seated side by 
side on sandbags, bending over the same book. 

It was a Virgil, and Jean was reading out loud 
the delicious episode of Silenus. Two youths have 
discovered the old god lying in a drunken sleep— 
he is always drunk and it makes men mock at him, 
albeit they still revere him—and have bound him in 
chains of flowers to force him to sing. A%glé, the 
159 


160 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


fairest of the Naiads, has stained his cheeks scarlet 
with juice of the mulberry, and lo! he sings. 

‘He sings how from out the mighty void were 
drawn together the germs of earth and air and sea 
and of the subtle fire likewise; how of these begin- 
nings came all the elements, and the fluid globe of 
the firmament grew into solid being; how presently 
the ground began to harden and to imprison 
Nereus in the ocean, and little by little to take on 
the shapes of things. He sings how anon con- 
tinents marvelled to behold a new-emerging sun; 
how the clouds broke up in the welkin and the rains 
descended, what time the woods put forth their 
first green and beasts first prowled by ones and 
twos over the unnamed mountain-tops.” 

Jean broke off to observe: 

“How admirably it all brings out Virgil’s spirit, 
so serious and tender! ‘The poet has put a cos- 
mogony in an idyll. Antiquity called him the Vir- 
gin. The name well befits his Muse, and we should 
picture her as a Mnemosyne pondering over the 
works of men and the causes of things!” 

Meanwhile Garneret, with a more concentrated 
attention and his finger on the lines, was marshalling 
his ideas. The players were still at their game, 


JEAN SERVIEN 161 


and the little copper discs they used for throwing 
kept rolling close to his feet, and the canteen-woman 
passed backwards and forwards with her little 
barrel. 

“See this, Servien,” he said presently; “‘in these 
lines Virgil, or rather the poet of the Alexandrine 
age who was his model, has anticipated Laplace’s 
great hypothesis and Charles Lyell’s theories. He 
shows cosmic matter, that negative something from 
which everything must come, condensing to make 
worlds, the plastic rind of the globe consolidating; 
then the formation of islands and continents; then 
the rains ceasing and first appearance of the sun, 
heretofore veiled by opaque clouds; then vegetable 
life manifesting itself before animal, because the 


latter cannot maintain itself and endure save by 
” 





absorbing the elements of the former 

At that moment a stir was apparent along the 
ramparts. The players broke off their game and 
the two friends lifted their heads. It was a train 
of wounded going by. Under the curtains of the 
lumbering ambulance-waggons marked with the 
Geneva red cross could be seen livid faces tied up 
‘n bloodstained bandages. Linesmen and mobiles 


tramped behind, their arms hanging in slings. ‘The 


162 JEAN SERVIEN 


Nationals proffered them handfuls of tobacco and 
asked for news. But the wounded men only shook 
their heads and trudged stolidly on their way. 

“Aren't we to have some fighting soon as well 
as other fellows?” cried Garneret. 

To which Servien growled back: 

‘“‘We must first put down the traitors and in- 
capables who govern us, proclaim the Commune 
and march all together against the Prussians.” 


XXIX 









pew ATRED of the Empire which had 
3 tz) left him to rot in a back-shop and a 
beesmey| school class-room, love of the Repub- 
Fal lic that was to bring every blessing 
in its train had, since the proclama- 
tion of September 4, raised Jean Servien’s warlike 
enthusiasm to fever heat. But he soon wearied of 
the long drills in the Luxembourg gardens and the 
hours of futile sentry-go behind the fortifications. 
The sight of tipsy shopkeepers in a frenzy of fool- 
ish ardour, half drink, half patriotism, sickened 
him, and this playing at soldiers, tramping through 
the mud on an empty stomach, struck him as after 
all an odious, ugly business. 

Luckily Garneret was his comrade in the ranks, 
and Servien felt the salutary effect of that well- 
stored, well-ordered mind, the servant of duty and 
stern reality. Only this saved him from a passion, 
as futile in the past as it was hopeless in the future, 
which was assuming the dangerous character of a 
mental disease. 

He had not seen Gabrielle again for a long 


time. The theatres were shut; all he knew, from 
163 


164 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


the newspapers, was that she was nursing the 
wounded in the theatre ambulance. He had no 
wish now to meet her. 

When he was not on duty, he used to lie in bed 
and read (it was a hard winter and wood was 
scarce), or else scour the boulevards and mix with 
the throng of idlers in search of news. One eve- 
ning, early in January, as he was passing the corner 
of the Rue Drouot, his attention was attracted by 
the clamour of voices, and he saw Monsieur Barge- 
mont being roughly handled by an ill-looking gang of 
National Guards. 

“T am a better Republican than any of you,” 
the big man was vociferating; “I have always pro- 
tested against the infamies of the Empire. But 
when you shout: Vive Blanqui! . .. excuse me 
. . . I have a right to shout: Vive Jules Favre! 





excuse me, I have a perfect right 7 butlins 
voice was drowned in a chorus of yells. Men in 
képis shook their fists at him, shouting: “Traitor! 
no surrender! Down with Badinguet!” His broad 
face, distraught with terror, still bore traces of 
its erstwhile look of smug effrontery. A girl in 
the crowd shrieked: ‘Throw him in the river!” 
and a hundred voices took up the cry. But just 
at that moment the crowd swayed back violently 


JEAN SERVIEN 165 


and Monsieur Bargemont darted into the fore- 
court of the Mairie. A squad of police officers 
received him in their ranks and closed in round 
him. He was saved! 

Little by little the crowd melted away, and 
Jean heard a dozen different versions of the inci- 
dent as it travelled with ever-increasing exaggera- 
tion from mouth to mouth. The last comers learned 
the startling news that they had just arrested 
a German general officer, who had sneaked into 
Paris as a spy to betray the city to the enemy with 
the connivance of the Bonapartists. 

The streets being once more passable, Jean saw 
Monsieur Bargemont come out of the Mairie. He 
was very red and a sleeve of his overcoat was torn 
away. 

Jean made up his mind to follow him. 

Along the boulevards he kept him in view at a 
distance, and not much caring whether he lost track 
of him or no; but when the Functionary turned up 
a cross street, the young man closed in on his quarry. 
He had no particular suspicion even now; a mere 
instinct urged him to dog the man’s heels. Mon- 
sieur Bargemont wheeled to the right, into a fairly 
broad street, empty and badly lighted by petroleum 
flares that supplied the place of the gas lamps. It 


166 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


was the one street Jean knew better than another. 
He had been there so often and often! The shape 
of the doors, the colour of the shop-fronts, the 
lettering on the sign-boards, everything about it 
was familiar; not a thing in it, down to the night-bell 
at the chemist’s and druggist’s, but called up mem- 
ories, associations, to touch him. The footsteps of 
the two men echoed in the silence. Monsieur 
Bargemont looked round, advanced a few paces 
more and rang at a door. Jean Servien had now 
come up with him and stood beside him under the 
archway. It was the same door he had kissed one 
night of desperation, Gabrielle’s door. It opened; 
Jean took a step forward and Monsieur Bargemont, 
going in first, left it open, thinking the National 
Guard there was a tenant going home to his lodging. 
Jean slipped in and climbed two flights of the dark 
staircase. Monsieur Bargemont ascended to the 
third floor and rang at a door on the landing, which 
was opened. Jean could hear Gabrielle’s voice 
saying: 

“How late you are coming home, dear; I have 
sent Rosalie to bed; I was waiting up for you, you 
scons 

The man replied, still puffing and panting with 


his exertions: 


JEAN SERVIEN 167 


“Just fancy, they wanted to pitch me into the 
river, those scoundrels! But never you mind, I’ve 
brought you something mighty rare and precious— 
a pot of butter.” 

“Like Little Red Ridinghood,” laughed Gabri- 
elle’s voice. “Come in and you shall tell me all 
about it. . . . Hark! do you hear?” 

“What, the guns? Oh! that never stops.” 

‘“‘No, the noise of a fall on the stairs.” 

“You're dreaming!” 

‘Give me the candle, I’m going to look.” 

Monsieur Bargemont went down two or three 
steps and saw Jean stretched motionless on the 
landing. 

“A drunkard,” he said; ‘‘there’s so many of them! 
they were drunkards, those chaps who wanted to 
drown me.” 

He was holding his light to Jean’s ashy face, 
while Gabrielle, leaning over the rail, looked on: 


* she said; ‘‘he is too 


“It’s not a drunken man,’ 
white. Perhaps it is a poor young fellow dying 
of hunger. When you’re brought down to rations 
of bread and horseflesh a 


Then she looked more carefully under frowning 





brows, and muttered: 


“It’s very queer, it’s really very queer!” 


168 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


‘Do you know him?” asked Bargemont. 


? 





“IT am trying to remember 

But there was no need to try; already she had 
recalled it all—how her hand had been kissed at 
the gate of the little house at Bellevue. 

Running to her rooms, she returned with water 
and a bottle of ether, knelt beside the fainting man, 
and slipping her arm, which was encircled by the 
white band of a nursing sister, under his shoulders, 
raised Jean’s head. He opened his eyes, saw her, 
heaved the deepest sigh of love ever expelled from 
a human breast and felt his lids fall softly to 
again. He remembered nothing; only she was 
bending over him; and her breath had caressed his 
cheek. Now she was bathing his temples, and he 
felt a delicious sense of returning life. Monsieur 
Bargemont with the candle leant over Jean Servien, 
who, opening his eyes for the second time, saw the 
man’s coarse red cheek within an inch of the 
actrése §:delicate-ear, Plésgavea greatcry anda 
convulsive spasm shook his body. 

“Perhaps it is an epileptic fit,” said Monsieur 
Bargemont, coughing; he was catching cold standing 
on the staircase. 

She protested: 


JEAN SERVIEN 169 


“We cannot leave a sick man without doing some- 
thing for him. Go and wake Rosalie.” 

He remounted the stairs, grumbling. Meantime 
Jean had got to his feet and was standing with 
averted head. 

She said to him in a low tone: 

“So you love me still ?” 

He looked at her with an indescribable sadness: 

“No, I don’t love you any longer’”—and he stag- 
gered down the stairs. 

Monsieur Bargemont reappeared: 

“It’s very curious,” he said, “but I can’t make 
Rosalie hear.” 

The actress shrugged her shoulders. 

“Look here, go away, will you? I have a horrid 
headache. Go away, Bargemont.” 





XXX 


cpio HE was Bargemont’s mistress! The 





SAS thought was torture to Jean Servien, 

~S; the more atrocious from the un- 
ry, d expectedness of the discovery. He 
both hated and despised the coarse 
rufian whose sham good-nature did not impose on 





him, and whom he knew for a brutal, dull-witted, 
mean-spirited bully. That pimply face, those 
goggle eyes, that forehead with the swollen black 
vein running across it, that heavy hand, that ugly, 
It sickened him to 
think of it! And disgust was the thing of all others 
Servien’s delicately balanced nature felt most keenly. 





vulgar soul, could it be 


His morality was shaky, and he could have found 
excuse for elegant vices, refined perversions, roman- 
tic crimes. But Bargemont and his pot of but- 
ter! . . . Never to possess the most adorable of 
women, never to see her more, he was quite willing 
for the sacrifice still, but to know her in the arms of 
that coarse brute staggered the mind and rendered 
life impossible. 


171 


r72 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


Absorbed in such thoughts, he found his way 

back instinctively to his own quarter of the city. 
Shells whistled over his head and burst with terrific 
reports. Flying figures passed him, their heads en- 
veloped in handkerchiefs and carrying mattresses on 
their backs. At the corner of the Rue de Rennes he 
tripped over a lamp-post lying across the pavement 
beside a half-demolished wall. In front of his 
father’s shop he saw a huge hole. He went to open 
the door; a shell had burst it in and he could see the 
work-bench capsized in a dark corner. 
_ Then he remembered that the Germans were 
bombarding the left bank, and he felt a sudden 
impulse to roam the streets under the rain of 
iron. 

A voice hailed him, issuing from underground: 

‘Is it you, my lad? Come in quick; you’ve given 
me a fine fright. Come down here; we are settled 
in: the-cellar,”’ 

He followed his father and found beds arranged 
in the underground chambers, while the main cellar 
served as kitchen and sitting-room. The bookbinder 
had a map, and was pointing out to the concierge 
and tenants the position of the relieving armies. 
Aunt Servien sat in a dim corner, her eyes fixed in a 
dull stare, mumbling bits of biscuit soaked in wine. 


JEAN SERVIEN 173 


She had no notion of what was happening, but 
maintained an attitude of suspicion. 

The little assemblage, which had been living this 
subterranean life since the evening of the day 
before, asked what news young Servien brought. 
Then the bookbinder resumed the explanations 
which as an old soldier and a responsible man he had 
been asked to give the company. 

‘The thing to do is,” he continued, “‘to join hands 
with the Army of the Loire, piercing the circle of 
iron that shuts us in. Admiral La Ronciére has 


carried the positions at Epinay away beyond Long. 


2) 





jumeau 

Then turning to Jean: 

““My lad, just find me Longjumeau on the map; 
my eyes are not what they were at twenty, and these 
tallow candles give a very poor light.” 

At that moment a tremendous explosion shook 
the solid walls and filled the cellar with dust. The 
women screamed; the porter went off to make his 
rounds of inspection, tapping the walls with his 
heavy keys; an enormous spider scampered across 
the vaulted roof. 

Then the conversation was resumed as if nothing 
had happened, and two of the lodgers started a 
game of cards on an upturned cask. 


174 JEAN SERVIEN 


Jean was dog-tired and fell asleep on the floor 
—a nightmare sleep. 

‘Tas the little lad come home?” asked Aunt 
Servien, still sucking at her biscuit. 


XXXI 


eg FLD Servien, in his working jacket, 
stepped up to the bed; then, creep- 
ing away again on tip-toe: 

“He is asleep, Monsieur Garneret, 





he is asleep. The doctor tells us he 
is saved. He is a very good doctor! You know 
that yourself, for he is your friend, and it was you 
brought him here. You have been our saviour, 
Monsieur Garneret.”’ 

And the bookbinder turned his head away to wipe 
his eyes, walked across to the window, lifted the 
curtain and looked out into the sunlit street. 

‘The fine weather will quite set him up again. 
But we have had six terrible weeks. I never lost 
heart; it is not in the nature of things that a father 
should despair of his son’s life; still, you know, 
Monsieur Garneret, he has been very ill. 

‘The neighbours have been very good to us; but 
it was a hard job nursing him in this cursed cellar. 
Just think, Monsieur Garneret, for twenty days we 
had to keep his head in ice.” 

‘You know that is the treatment for meningitis.” 
175 


176 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


The bookbinder came up confidentially to Gar- 
neret. He scatched his ear, rubbed his forehead, 
stroked his chin in great embarrassment. 

‘“My pocr lad,” he got started at last, “‘is in love, 
passionately in love. I have found it out from the 
things he said when he was delirious. It is not my 
way to interfere with what does not concern me; but 
as I see the matter is serious, I am going to ask you, 
for his own good, to tell me who it is, if you know 
her: 

Garneret shrugged his shoulders: 

‘An actress! a tragedy actress! pooh!” 

The bookbinder pondered a moment; then: 

“Look you, Monsieur Garneret, I acted for the 
best in my poor boy’s interest, but I blame myself. 
I tell myself this, the education I gave him has dis- 
qualified him for hard work and practical life... . 
An actress, you say, a tragedy actress? Tastes of 
that sort must be acquired in the schools. Those 
times he was attending his classes, I used to get hold 
of his exercise books after he had gone to bed and 
read whatever there wasin French. It was my way 
of checking his work; because, ignoramus as he may 
be, a man can see, with a little common sense, what 
is done properly and what is scamped. Well, 
Monsieur Garneret, I was terrified to find in his 


JEAN SERVIEN 177 


themes so many high-flown ideas; some of them were 
very fine, no doubt, and I copied out on a paper 
those that struck me most. But I used to tell my- 
self: All these grand speeches, all these histories, 
taken from the books of the ancient Romans, are 
going to put my lad’s head in a fever, and he will 
never know the truth of things. I was right, my 
dear Monsieur Garneret; it is school learning, look 
you, has made him fall in love with a tragedy 
actress 





Jean Servien raised himself up in bed. 

“Ts that you, Garneret? I am very glad to see 
you.” 

Then, after listening a moment: 

“Why, what is that noise?” he asked. 

Garneret told him it was Mont Valerien firing 
on the fortifications. The Commune was in full 
swing. 

“Vive la Commune!” cried Jean Servien, and he 


dropped his head back on the pillow with a smile. 





XXXII 


aya) E was recovered and, with a book in 
“Al b his hand, was taking a quiet walk 
| in the Luxembourg gardens. He 
had that feeling of harmless selfish- 
ness, that self-pity that comes with 





convalescence. Of his previous life, all he cared to 
remember was a charming face bending over him 
and a voice sweeter than the loveliest music murmur- 
ing: ‘So you love me still?” Oh! never fear, he 
would not answer now as he did on that dreadful 
staircase: ‘‘I don’t love you any longer.” No, he 
would answer with eyes and lips and open arms: 
“T shall love you always!” Still the odious spectre 
of his rival would cross his memory at times and 
cause him agonies. Suddenly his eyes were caught 
by an extraordinary sight. 

Two yards away from him in the garden, in 
front of the orange-house, was Monsieur Tudesco, 
burly and full-blown as usual, but how meta- 
morphosed in costume! He wore a National 
Guard’s tunic, covered with glittering aiguillettes ; 
from his red sash peeped the butts of a brace of 

179 


180 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


pistols. On his head was perched a képi with five 
gold bands. The central figure of a group of 
women and children, he was gazing at the heavens 
with as much tender emotion as his little green eyes 
were capable of expressing. His whole person 
breathed a sense of power and kindly patronage. 
His right hand rested at arm’s length on a little 
boy’s head, and he was addressing him in a set 
speech: 

“Young citizen, pride of your mother’s heart, 
ornament of the public parks, hope of the Commune, 
hear the words of the prescribed exile. I say it: 
Young citizen, the 18th of March is a great day; it 
witnessed the foundation of the Commune, it rescued 
you from slavery. Grave on your heart’s core that 
never-to-be-forgotten date. I say it: We have 
suffered and fought for you. Son of the disin- 
herited and despairing, you shall be a free man!” 

He ended, and restoring the child to its mother, 
smiled upon his listeners of the fair sex, who were 
lost in admiration of his eloquence, his red sash, 
his gold lace and his green old age. 

Albeit it was three o’clock in the afternoon, he 
had not drunk more than he could carry, and he trod 
the sandy walks with a mien of masterful assurance 
amid the plaudits of the people. 


_ JEAN SERVIEN 181 


Jean advanced to meet him; he had a soft place 
in his heart for the old man. Monsieur Tudesco 
grasped his hand with a fatherly affection and 
declaimed: 

“I am overjoyed to see my dear disciple, the child 
of my intellect. Monsieur Servien, look yonder and 
never forget the sight; it is the spectacle of a free 
people.” 

The fact is, a throng of citizens of both sexes 
was tramping over the lawns, picking the flowers 
in the beds and breaking branches from the trees. 

The two friends tried to find seats on a bench; 
but these were all occupied by fédérés of all ranks 
huddled up on them and snoring in chorus. For 
this reason Monsieur Tudesco opined it was better 
to adjourn to a café. 

They came upon one in the Place de l’Odéon, 
where Monsieur Tudesco could display his striking 
uniform to his own satisfaction. 

“I am an engineer,” he announced, when he was 
seated with his bitter before him, ‘‘an engineer in the 
service of the Commune, with the rank of Colonel.” 

Jean thought it mighty strange all the same. No 
doubt he had heard his old tutor’s tales about his 
confabulations at the dram-shop with the leaders of 
the Commune, but it struck him as extraordinary 


182 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


that the Monsieur Tudesco he knew should have 
blossomed into an engineer and Colonel under any 
circumstances. But there was the fact. Monsieur 
Tudesco manifested no surprise, not he! 

“Science!” he boasted, “‘science is everything! 
It’s study does it! Knowledge is power! To 
vanquish the myrmidons of despotism, we must have 
science. That is why I am an engineer with the 
rank of Colonel.” 

And Monsieur Tudesco went on to relate how he 
was charged with very special duties—to discover 
the underground passages which the instruments of 
tyranny had dug beneath the capital, tunnelling 
under the two branches of the Seine, for the trans- 
port of munitions of war. At the head of a gang of 
navvies, he inspected the palaces, hospitals, barracks 
and religious houses, breaking up cellars and staving 
in drain-pipes. Science! science is everything! He 
also inspected the crypts of churches, to unearth 
traces of the priests’ lubricity. Knowledge is 
power! 

After the bitter came absinthe and Colonel 
Tudesco proposed for Servien’s consideration a lu- 
crative post at the Delegacy for Foreign Affairs. 

But Jean shook his head. He felt tired and had 


lost all heart. 


JEAN SERVIEN 183 


“T see what it is,” cried the Colonel, patting him 
on the shoulder; “‘you are young and inlove. ‘There 
are two spirits breathe their inspiration alternately 
in the ear of mankind—Love and Ambition. Love 
speaks the first; and you are still hearkening to his 
voice, my young friend.” 

Jean, who had drunk his share of absinthe, 
confessed that he was deeper in love than ever and 
that he was jealous. He related the episode of the 
staircase and inveighed bitterly against Monsieur 
Bargemont. Nor did he fail to identify his case 
with the good of the Commune, by making out 
Gabrielle’s lover to be a Bonapartist and an enemy 
of the people. 

Colonel Tudesco drew a note-book from his 
pocket, inscribed Bargemont’s name and address in 
it, and cried: 

“Tf the man has not fled like a poltroon, we will 
make a hostage of him! I am the friend of the 
Citizen Delegate in charge of the Prefecture of 
Police, and I say it: you shall be avenged on the 
infamous Bargemont! Have you read the decree 
concerning hostages? No? Read it then; it is an 
inimitable monument of the wisdom of the people. 

“T tear myself regretfully from your company, 
my young friend. But I must be gone to discover 


184 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


an underground passage the Sisters of Marie- 
Joseph, in their contumacy, have driven right from 
the Prison of Saint-Lazare to the Mother Convent 
in the village of Argenteuil. It is a long tunnel by 
which they communicate with the traitors at Ver- 
sailles. Come and see me in my quarters at the 
General Staff, in the Place Vendome. Farewell and 
fraternal greeting!” 

Jean paid the Colonel’s score and set out for 
home. The walls were all plastered over with 
posters and proclamations. He read one that was 
half hidden under bulletins of victories: 


“Article [V. All persons detained in custody by 
the verdict of the jury of accusation shall be hostages 
of the people of Paris. 

“Article V. Every execution of a prisoner of 
war or a partisan of the government of the Com- 
mune of Paris shall be followed by the instant 
execution of thrice the number of hostages detained 
in virtue of Article IV, the same being chosen by 


lon” 


He frowned dubiously and asked himself : 
“Can it be I have denounced a man as hostage ?” 


But his fears were soon allayed; Colonel Tudesco 


JEAN SERVIEN 185 


was only a wind-bag, and could not really arrest 
people. Besides, was it credible that Bargemont, 
head of a Ministerial Department, was still in 
Paris? And after all, if he did come to harm, well, 
so much the worse for him! 


XXXII 


m™ WO days after a cab with a musket 
barrel protruding from either win- 
dow stopped before the bookbinder’s 
shop. The two National Guards 
who stumbled out of it demanded to 





see the citizen Jean Servien, handed him a sealed 
packet and signed to him to open the door wide and 
wait for them. Next minute they reappeared 
carrying a full-length portrait. 

It represented a woman of forty or thereabouts, 
with a yellow face, very long and disproportionately 
large for the frail, sickly body it surmounted, and 
dressed in an unpretending black gown. She wore 
a sad, submissive look. Her grey eyes bespoke a 
contrite and fearful heart, the cheeks were pendulous 
and the loose chin almost touched the bosom. Jean 
scrutinized the poor, pitiful face, but could recall 
no memory in connection with it. He opened the 


letter and read: 


Commune of Paris—General Staff. 


“Order to deliver to the citizen Jean Servien the 


portrait of Madame Bargemont. ie 
TUDESCO. 


187 


188 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


‘Colonel commanding the Subterranean Ways of 
the Commune.” 


Jean wanted to ask the National Guards what it 
all meant, but already the cab was driving off, 
bayonets protruding from both windows. ‘The 
passers-by, who had long ceased to be surprised at 
anything, cast a momentary glance after the retreat- 
ing vehicle. 

Jean, left alone with Madame Bargemont'’s 
portrait before him, began to ask himself why 
his disconcerting friend Tudesco had sent it to 
him. 

‘The wretch,’ he told himself, ‘‘must have 
arrested Bargemont and sacked his apartments.” 

Meantime Madame Bargemont was gazing at 
him with a martyr’s haunting eyes. She locked so 
unhappy that Jean was filled with pity. 

“Poor woman!” he ejaculated, and turning the 
canvas face to the wall, he left the house. 

Presently the bookbinder returned to his work 
and, though anything but an inquisitive man, was 
tempted to look at this big picture that blocked up 
his shop. He scratched his head, wondering if this 
could be the actress his son was in love with. He 
opined she must be mightily taken with the young 


JEAN SERVIEN 189 


man to send him so large a portrait in so handsome 
a frame. He could not see anything to capture a 
lover’s fancy. 

‘At any rate, he thought, ‘“‘she does not look like 
a bad woman.” 


ae on 
me) ee 
; ee § a 





XXXIV 


$A EAN stepped over the bodies of two 
or three drunken National Guards 
and found himself in the room occu- 
pied by Colonel Tudesco and in that 
worthy’s presence. The Colonel 


lay snoring on a satin sofa, a cold chicken on the 





table at his elbow. He wore his spurs. Jean shook 
him roughly by the shoulder and asked him where 
the portrait came from, declaring that he, Jean, had 
not the smallest wish to keep it. The Colonel woke, 
but his speech was thick and his memory confused. 
His mind was full of his underground passages. 
He was commander of them all and could not find 
one. There was something in this fact that offended 
his sense of justice. The Lady Superior of the 
Nuns of Marie-Joseph had refused to betray the 
secret of the famous Saint-Lazare tunnel. 

‘“‘She has refused,” declared the old Italian, ‘‘out 
of contumacy—and also, perhaps, because there is 
no tunnel. And, since truth must out, I’m bound to 
say, if I was not Commandant of the subterranean 

Ig! 


192 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


passages of the capital, I should really think there 
were none.’ 

His wits came back little by little. 

‘Young man, you have seen the soldier reposing 
from his labours. What question have you come to 
ask the veteran champion of freedom?” 

‘About Bargemont? About that Portrait?” 

“T know, know. I proceeded with a dozen men 
to his domicile to arrest him, but he had taken to 
flight, the coward! I carried out a perquisition in 
his rooms. In the salon I saw Madame Barge- 
mont’s portrait and I said: ‘That lady looks as 
sad as Monsieur Jean Servien. They are both 
victims of the infamous Bargemont; I will bring 
them together and they shall console each other.’ 
Monsieur Servien, oblige me by tasting that cognac; 
it comes from the cellar of your odious rival.” 

He poured the brandy into two big glasses and 
hiccuped with a laugh: 

“The cognac of an enemy tastes well.” 

Then he fell back on the sofa, muttering: 


39 


‘The soldier reposing 





His face was crimson. Jean shrugged his 
shoulders and left the room. He had _ hardly 
opened the door when the old man began howling 


in his sleep: ‘Help! help! they’re murdering me.” 


JEAN SERVIEN 193 


In an instant the fédérés on guard hurled them- 
selves upon Jean; he could feel the cold muzzles of 
revolvers at his temples and hear rifles banging off 
at random in the ante-room. 

The Colonel was raving in the frenzy of alcoholic 
delirium, writhing in horrible convulsions and yell- 
ing: “‘he has killed me! he has murdered me!” 

“He has murdered the Colonel,” the fédérés 
took up the cry. “He has poisoned him. Take 
him before the court martial.” 

“Shoot him right away. He’s an assassin; the 
Versaillais have sent him.” 

“Off with him to the lock-up!” 

Servien’s denials and struggles were in vain. 
Again and again he protested: 

“You can see for yourself he’s drunk and asleep!” 

“Listen to him—he is insulting the sovereign 
people.” 

‘Pitch him in the river!” 

“Swing him on a lamp-post.” 

“Shoot him!” 

Bundled down the stairs, rifle-butts prodding him 
in the back to help him along, Jean was haled 
before an officer, who there and then signed an order 


of arrest. 





XXXV 


E had been in solitary confinement in 


4 a cell at the depot for sixteen days 


now—or was it fifteen?—he was 


SS, ee 
D) LE (s pI 
‘ =, ~ pel 
j if ») Ss 
‘ > , 
*) oo EM on 
th = 
* Ce ay 
- 
b 
oa ry 


not sure. The hours dragged by 





Pee with an excruciating monotony and 
tediousness. 

At the start he had demanded justice and loudly 
protested his innocence. But he had come to realize 
at last that justice had no concern with his case or 
that of the priests and gendarmes confined within 
the same walls. He had given up all thought of 
persuading the savage frenzy of the Commune to 
listen to reason, and deemed it the wisest thing to 
hold his tongue and the best to be forgotten. He 
trembled to think how easily it might end in tragedy, 
and his anguish seemed to choke him. 

Sometimes, as he sat dreaming, he could see a 
tree against a patch of blue sky, and great tears 
would rise to his eyes. 

It was there, in his prison cell, Jean learned to 
know the shadowy joys of memory. 

He thought of his good old father sitting at his 

195 


196 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


work-bench or tightening the screw of the press; he 
thought of the shop packed with bound volumes and 
bindings, of his little room where of evenings he 
read books of travel—of all the familiar things of 
home. And every time he reviewed in spirit the 
poor thin romance of his unpretending life, he felt 
his cheeks burn to think how it was all dominated, 
almost every episode controlled, by this drunken 
parasite of a Tudesco! It was true nevertheless! 
paramount over his studies, his loves, his dangers, 
over all his existence, loomed the rubicund face of 
the old villain! The shame of it! He had lived 
very ill! but what a meagre life it had been too. 
How cruel it was, how unjust! and there was more 
of self-pity in the poor, sore heart than of anger. 
Every day, every hour he thought of Gabrielle; 
but how changed the complexion of his love for her! 
Now it was a tender, tranquil sentiment, a disinter- 
ested affection, a sweet, soothing reverie. It was a 
vision of a wondrous delicacy, such as loneliness and 
unhappiness alone can form in the souls they shield 
from the rude shocks of the common life—the 
dream of a holy life, a life dim and overshadowed, 
vowed wholly and completely, without reward or 
recompense, to the woman worshipped from afar, as 


that of the good country curé is vowed to the God 


JEAN SERVIEN 197 


who never steps down from the tabernacle of the 
altar. 

His gaoler was a good-natured sous-officier who, 
amazed and horrified at what was going forward, 
clung to discipline as a sheet-anchor in the general 
shipwreck. He felt a rough, uncouth pity for his 
prisoners, but this never interfered with the strict 
performance of his duties, and Jean, who had no 
experience of soldiers’ ways, never guessed the man’s 
true character. However, he grew less and less 
unbending and taciturn the nearer the army of order 
approached the city. 

Finally, one day he had told his prisoner, with a 
wink of the eye: 

“Courage, lad! something’s going to turn up 
soon.” 

The same afternoon Jean heard a distant sound 
of musketry; then, all in a moment, the door of his 
cell opened and he saw an avalanche of prisoners 
roll from one end of the corridor to the other. 
The gaoler had unlocked all the cells and shouted 
the words, ‘Every man for himself; run for it!” 
Jean himself was carried along, down stairs and 
passages, out into the prison courtyard, and pitched 
head foremost against the wall. By the time he 
recovered from the shock of his fall, the prisoners 


198 ATID ASPIRATIONS: OF 


had vanished, and he stood alone before the open 
wicket. 

Outside in the street he heard the crackle of 
musketry and saw the Seine running grey under 
the lowering smoke-cloud of burning Paris. Red 
uniforms appeared on the Quai de l’Ecole. The 
Pont-au-Change was thick with fédérés. Not know- 
ing where to fly, he was for going back into the 
prison; but a body of Vengeurs de Lutéce, in full 
flight, drove him before their bayonets towards the 
Pont-au-Change. A woman, a cantiniére, kept 
shouting: ‘Don’t let him go, give him his gruel. 
He’s a Versaillais.”’ The squad halted on the Quai- 
au-F leurs, and Jean was pushed against the wall of 
the Hotel-Dieu, the cantiniére dancing and gesticula- 
ting in front of him. Her hair flying loose under 
her gold-laced képi, with her ample bosom and her 
elastic figure poised gallantly on the strong, well- 
shaped limbs, she had the fierce beauty of some 
magnificent wild animal. Hier little round mouth 
was wide open, yelling menaces and obscenities, as 
she brandished a revolver. The Vengurs de 
Lutéce, hard-pressed and dispirited, looked stolidly 
at their white-faced prisoner against the wall, and 
then looked in each other’s faces. Her fury re- 
doubled; threatening them collectively, addressing 


JEAN SERVIEN 199 


each man by some vile nickname, pacing in front of 
them with a bold swing of the powerful hips, the 
woman dominated them, intoxicated them with her 
puissant influence. 

They formed up in platoon. 

‘Fire!’ cried the cantiniere. 

Jean threw out his arms before him. 

Two or three shots went off. He could hear 
the balls flatten against the wall, but he was not 
hit. 

“Fire! fire!’ The woman repeated the cry in 
the voice of an angry, self-willed child. 

She had been through the fighting, this girl, she 
had drunk her fill from staved-in wine-casks and 
slept on the bare ground, pell-mell with the men, 
out in the public square reddened with the glare of 
conflagration. ‘They were killing all around her, 
and nobody had been killed yet for her. She was 
resolved they should shoot her someone, before 
the end! Stamping with fury, she reiterated her 
cry; 

Sates firew hired 

Again the guns were cocked and the barrels 
levelled. But the Vengeurs de Lutéce had not much 
heart left; their leader had vanished; they were 


disorganized, they were running away; sobered and 


200 THE ASPIRATIONS OF 


stupefied, they knew the game was up. They were 
quite willing all the same to shoot the bourgeois 
there at the wall, before bolting for covert, each 
to hide in his own hole. 

Jean tried to say: ‘‘Don’t make me suffer more 
than need be!” but his voice stuck in his throat. 

One of the Vengeurs cast a look in the direction 
of the Pont-au-Change and saw that the fédérés 
were losing ground. Shouldering his musket, he 
said: 

“‘Let’s clear out of the bl—y place, by God!” 

The men hesitated; some began to slink away. 

At this the cantiniére shrieked: 

‘‘Bl——-sted hounds! Then J’/] have to do his 
business for him!” 

She threw herself on Jean Servien and spat in his 
face; she abandoned herself to a frantic orgy of 
obscenity in word and gesture and clapped the muz- 
zle of her revolver to his temple. 

Then he felt all was over and waited. 

A thousand things flashed in a second before his 
eyes; he saw the avenues under the old trees 
where his aunt used to take him walking in old 
days; he saw himself a little child, happy and won- 
dering; he remembered the castles he used to build 
with strips of plane-tree bark ... The trigger 


JEAN SERVIEN 201 


was pulled. Jean beat the air with his arms and 
fell forward face to the ground. The men finished 
him with their bayonets; then the woman danced 
on the corpse with yells of joy. 

The fighting was coming closer. A_ well- 
sustained fire swept the Quai. The woman was the 
last to go. Jean Servien’s body lay stretched in 
the empty roadway. His face wore a strange look 
of peacefulness; in the temple was a little hole, 
barely visible; blood and mire fouled the pretty 
hair a mother had kissed with such transports of 
fondness. 


THE END 





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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES 
COLLEGE LIBRARY 


This book is due on the last date stamped below. 





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